The Late Show

Trinidad’s 13th collection is a cinematic recuperation of the more and less significant people, places, encounters and objects that compose the movie of a life. In these loquacious, unfettered and sometimes playful poems, Trinidad painstakingly recalls divas, artists, friends, lovers and his mother. In looking back, the poet couches his memories in pop culture and formal experimentation: his Nature Poem is a clever arrangement of movie titles (How a Tree Grows in Brooklyn/ Autumn Leaves// Lost Horizon/ Gone with the Wind), and Gloss of the Past is an indulgent prose catalogue of pink lip gloss names (Fluffy Moth Pink… Turn Pale Pink). In rambling, accumulative elegies in long lines or prose, a jar of Topaze cream (a yellow jewel embedded in the lid) is one of many relentlessly remembered details that accrue toward simple, moving admissions, such as: I miss my mother. The long closing piece, A Poem Under the Influence, is a confessional and discursive look at the past by an obsessively collecting and recollecting mind that admits: Better to look pinkly through a glass at the tarnished past,/ count my blessings (on both hands), and call it a day. But I have to ask: why…

• “Deeply personal, yet cooly postmodern, no other writer besides David Trinidad makes the interface between our private memories and our cultural ones appear so seemless. At times, variously giddy, gossipy, melancholy, obsessive, and euphoric, his voice has an amazing plasicity as he slips between genres and forms, tradition and invention,with assurance and grace. The Late Show is a unique collection of interlocking facets: art literary memoir, part film encyclopedia, part shrine and momento mori—and always undeniably, pure poem.” —Elaine Equi