It is chilling and dreamy; horrifying, heartbreaking, and gorgeous. "It was just this constant desire. It was just this / this constant desire for anything / that moved across my field of vision. For anything / that moved. I was just this".

WillieWorld

Literature & Fiction

Dubris, Maggie

Poetry

CUZ Publications

Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, "WilleWorld," all based on Maggie Dubris' experience as an EMS worker in and around Times Square, New York City. Here, too, is an ambitious series of linked poems, "Toilers of the Sea," concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new. Ms. Dubris tells us "how it is" in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems are full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels. The New York street photographer Weegee wrote: "When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track." Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track. "I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war," she writes. "I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that's not how it is."

Weep Not, My Wanton: Stories & Poems

United States

Black Sparrow Press

"With every call to save a life, Maggie Dubris - who worked as a 911 paramedic in Hell's Kitchen throughout the '80s and '90s enters a different and strange world. . . . . A vivid rendering of the lives of New York's poorest and most invisible." -New York Post"I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war," writes Maggie Dubris, a longtime paramedic in and around Times Square. "I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that's not how it is." In this, her debut collection, Dubris tells us "how it is" in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems - full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels - are the verbal equivalents of Weegee's photographs. It was Weegee who wrote: "When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you life and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track." Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track. Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, "WilleWorld," all based on Dubris' experience as an EMS worker in New York City. Here, too, is a ambitious series of linked poems, "Toilers of the Sea," concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new.

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Afterword by Antonino D'Ambrosio. BROKEDOWN PALACE is Maggie Dubris's ode to St. Clare's, the Hell's Kitchen hospital where she worked as an EMT for more than 25 years, until it closed. She weaves together prose and verse, memory and reportage, documents and testimonies into an epic ride that takes in the crumbling Times Square of the 80s, the parade of odd characters that passed through, the ad hoc expedients demanded by a hospital without funds, and then the crushing onslaught of AIDS. Her book is absorbing, funny, lyrical, and transcendentally sad, a stunning poetic monument to a New York City that no longer exists

BrokeDown Palace

Subpress

When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless peoplethe "skels"who comprise most of their patient population. Orlie draws parallels between her experiences to the stories and feelings represented in the works of her favorite writers, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, and Mark Twain. Skels was written with the question in mind of what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would the protagonist have done if she had met the greatest poet of all, dirty and covered with lice, and been granted the chance to save him? Not from dying, but from his own life. With Skels Dubris shares what she saw during her own time as an EMT not literally, but more importantaly, how she felt in her soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside.

Skels: A Novel

Soft Skull

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dubris, Maggie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dubris, Maggie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dubris, Maggie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

WillieWorld

Weep Not, My Wanton: Stories & Poems

Weep Not, My Wanton: Stories & Poems

BrokeDown Palace

Skels: A Novel