Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces. This item is unavailable.Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces

This suburban California coming of age navigates Trinidad’s personal history in the shadow of Hollywood, against the dramas of the 1960s and ’70s.

“Trinidad’s pieces teach us how memory and history are forms of yearning, and about what can and cannot be recovered.” —Amy Gerstler

“This is the writing of a poet who loves the world into language.” —Aaron Smith

Poet David Trinidad’s past is rich fodder for a collection of memory pieces that wind the reader through the underbelly of 1960s and ’70s America—and Southern California, more specifically. In Trinidad’s recollections, the proximity to Hollywood both glamorizes and condemns the bustling suburbs. Stains of the Manson murders and adoration for The Boys in the Band are documented with the same care as fascinations with Barbie dolls and twelve-cent comic books. The struggles of an awkward gay teenager meld into the weighty anecdotes of a young man who befriends famous writers, acts as a historian for familial legacies, and confronts the limitations of desire.

The title piece, “Digging to Wonderland,” presents a young David Trinidad and his friend Nancy as they tunnel into the ground of her backyard, in search of the next great adventure. Ultimately, we witness a childhood spent under the threat of annihilation: “So the ‘twinkly lights’ in the hills above Chatsworth were actually missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And without knowing it, I grew up under their spell.”

David Trinidad is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, collaborations, and edited volumes. These include Swinging on a Star, Notes on a Past Life, Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, and Plasticville, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Trinidad is editor of Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith and A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He is a professor of poetry at Columbia College, Chicago.