Sale

Winner of the 2014 Helen Kay Chapbook Poetry Prize

At the Booth Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers 1966 by Patti Sullivan

Cover design by Patti Sullivan

 ReadAt the Booth Memorial Home For Unwed Mothers 1966 on Google Books     At the Booth Memorial Home For Unwed Mothers 1966 available on Kindle     Read At the Booth Memorial Home For Unwed Mothers 1966 on scribd or read below

There was a place for girls like me…That place was the Booth Memorial Home for unwed mothers.

From her opening in Post Summer Blues –This was in the mid-sixties/girls didn’t keep their out of wedlock babies/my crime was being stupid and trusting, to her stunning afterward–In those first days/weeks months years/ after she found me/I couldn’t stop saying /Daughter—Patti Sullivan’s work is simply unforgettable. Her poems collectively constitute a portrait of a culture: mid-twentieth century, still-Puritanical, Southern California. Match-strike moments, achingly painful, sometimes darkly humorous, plunge us into a young woman’s cultural transgression and punishment. In Booth Memorial, Sullivan transcends era and location, to illuminate a timeless and placeless dilemma: how to say yes to life and dignity in the face of exile and unbearable loss. Long after turning the last page, we are left grateful and larger in spirit. —Maía, author of The SpiritLife of Birds, Adder’s Tongue Press
____________________

Patti Sullivan is our guide into the lives of dispossessed girls behind closed doors at the Booth Memorial Home; through her words their elemental loss finds its way into language, both sorrowing and redemptive. Her voice is clear, courageous, and achingly honest—these are poems that open the heart. —Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night, BOA Editions
____________________

Patti Sullivan’s poems are arrows, swift and quiet, hitting their mark, sinking deep. Powerful and necessary, these poems make me say when reading, “This is what poetry is for!” In Patti’s passionate, honest voice, I hear generations of silent women who nod their heads, murmur agreement, urge her forward. Why didn’t we ever talk about the truth, she questions the silence imposed upon her as a young unwed mother, would we die or catch fire. —Mary Kay Rummel, Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA, author of The Lifeline Trembles.

Read selections from At the Booth Memorial Home For Unwed Mothers 1966: Post Summer Blues  12  The Stories They Tell  13  Along Comes Mary  15  Home Away from Home at 17  17  Visiting Hours  18  The Most Beautiful Dress in the World  20  Going Over  21  Limbo   23  Forget About It—Why Can’t You  25  Notes on the Booth Memorial Home   26  from Evening Street Review, NUMBER 12, Spring 2015

Patti’s art on covers of Evening Street Review:

Evening Street Review #16

Evening Street Review #24

Evening Street Review #27

Evening Street Review #35