Birthdays Before and After

My fifth solo collection, "Birthdays Before and After," was published by Beyond Baroque Books in 2019. Edited by Iris Berry, founder of Punk Hostage Press and noted writer and LA punk icon. Introduction by Kat Georges, co-founder of Three Rooms Press, writer/poet/playwright.

Artwork Chelle Mayer, Cover Design, Dennis Doyle

It’s Puma Perl’s New York City, the street stoops and Coney Island, the heartbreaks, the heroin, the ghosts of Haring and the Chelsea Hotel. Like Jim Carroll born a woman, maybe, or Lou Reed with a keener grasp of the written word, her writing is as skillful as it is scary and wonderful. Makes startling poetics of the day-to-day, the big beats and saxophones and rush of subways. All the themes—isolation, sobriety, death, self-reflection, weddings and birthdays—are inescapable and ferocious in her hands. They’re earned words, so beautifully bent you could wear them as jewelry. —Brian Smith, author of Spent Saints and Tucson Salvage-Tales and Recollections of La Frontera

To the edgy, illustrious ranks of poets like Diane DiPrima and Charles Bukowski, let us now add the fearless, delirious genius of Puma Perl. Long a cult legend and staple of the Lower East Side poetry scene, with “Birthdays Before and After,” she steps forward and cements her place as 21st Century visionary and unsparing chronicler of the human condition. Anyone who cares about phenomenal writing and one-of-a-kind breathtaking lines on the page needs to read this book. Puma Perl is nothing short of a national treasure living in our midst. And “Birthdays” is a jewel. 

Jerry Stahl, Novelist, Memoirist, Screenwriter

According to William Carlos Williams there are “no ideas but in things;” Puma Perl’s “Birthdays Before and After” is filled with things, objects and places that deliver profound ideas through her New York voice, glowing like the moon and streetlight ricocheting across the bright surfaces of the dark city. Her lively characters fashion vignettes in these often-narrative poems, so that reading this book feels like a glitch in the universe, similar to the one in “Being John Malkovich”; the book is a portal that invites you right into the head of the author to see, feel, hear and touch through her body, this body of work. You can taste the asphalt and see the stars in these poems that are slices of an extraordinary, ordinary life. Her words deliver to the senses her unique sense, a grit and wisdom that informs her expert eye. The book leaves you on the floor with a memory box spilled around you, describing snapshots of how humanity endures through loss and chaos.

-Jane LeCroy, Poet and Educator

 Available from Beyond Baroque Books, from the author (contact me at pumaperl@mail.com for direct orders to individuals) and Amazon.

https://smile.amazon.com/Puma-Perl/e/B003VODDBK?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000