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Excerpts from Passage: The oldest of five children born to a Navy father and Italian Baroque Opera Drama Queen mother, Meg Withers grew up in a small northern California town full of Italian relatives and friends. She has traveled a lot, living in England and all over the continental U.S.A. She lived in Hawai`i for nine years, tending bar at Hamburger Mary’s, when many gay men she knew were dying of AIDS. She earned her MFA from San Francisco State and currently teaches at Gavilian Community College in Gilroy, California.
Open the door wide on Meg Withers’ A Communion of Saints,
then take the next step, enter the bar. Sit down with the band of
outsiders who band together to form a family of insiders. In these
beautifully sung poems, the gang, in full voice, offers up their
anthem; “We’re in with the out crowd. We go where the out crowd goes.
When you’re in with the out crowd, you know what the out crowd knows.”
In the center you’ll find ourgirl, pearl of a girl, who joins in,
becomes friend, loved one, trusted witness of all those who travel from
“life to death to life,” the whole way. Open the door to Meg Withers
expansive, inclusive, deeply moving collection and open the door on a
poetic heart as compassionate, fierce, loving and true as all get out.
--Toni Mirosevich There are rare times when poetics and politics collide to create a lasting mark. Like Ginsberg's Howl, Meg Withers' A Communion Of Saints
documents time and place, only this time informed by the anguish of
loss in the wake of the AIDS epidemic...”and in those days to say the
word aloud was death in one to seven years…we did not say the word
except in whispers late at night…when fallen angels could not hear us."
This is an important, difficult book . --Truong Tran Review of The Communion of Saints
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