Peyton Place

David Trinidad’s most recent book is Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point Press, 2011). His other books include Plasticville (2000), Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, 2003), The Late Show (2007), and By Myself (with D.A. Powell, 2009), all published by Turtle Point. He is also editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011), which won a Lambda Literary Award. Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green and is the 2011-2013 Distinguished Faculty Scholar.Originally from Los Angeles, Trinidad has been called “a master of the postmodern pop-culture sublime.” His work is also associated with the innovative formalism of the New York School. Alice Notley has written, “There is an unwavering light in all of Trinidad’s work that turns individual words into objects, new facts.” About The Late Show, the New York Times Book Review wrote that Trinidad’s “most impressive gift is an ability to dignify the dross of American life, to honor both the shrink-wrapped sentiment of the cultural artifacts he writes about and his own much more complicated emotional response to them.”

"In her poetry collection The Pedestrians, Rachel Zucker writes of a woman who is reading a novel about another woman: “The voice gets into her head” and “her thoughts have become inflected and unfamiliar.” That’s the extraordinary intimacy of reading, the penetration of one consciousness by another. “This is now the only way she leaves her city,” writes Zucker. The opportunity to think with another mind is also my preferred mode of travel. I like where I go, for instance, when I read David Trinidad’s Peyton Place, which is composed of one haiku for every episode of the soap opera. When my thinking is inflected by his wit, television is transformed into poetry and bad hair and tight slacks become the stuff of art."----- Eula Biss, THE MILLIONS, December 4, 2014