Book Review: Writers On The Edge

A compendium of tough prose and poetry about addiction.



Here’s a e book I’m delighted to advertise unabashedly. I even wrote a jacket blurb for it. I referred to as it an “honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These arduous-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they converse will be surprising to the uninitiated-bare prose and poetry about potentially deadly cravings the flesh is heir to-medicine, booze, slicing, overeating, melancholy, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.”
I am comfortable to face by that assertion, content to notice that this collection of prose and poetry on the subject of addiction and dependency by 22 proficient writers, with an introduction by Jerry Stahl of “Everlasting Midnight” junky fame, consists of quite a lot of names acquainted to me. That makes all of it the easier to suggest this e book-I do know among the talent. Take James Brown, a professor in the M.F.A program at Cal State San Bernardino, the e book’s co-editor, who affords an excerpt from his glorious memoir, This River.  James isn't any stranger to the topic, having pulled out of a drug and alcohol-fueled nosedive that would have felled lesser mortals for good. “Although you’ll always be struggling together with your dependancy, and will wind up again in rehab,” Brown writes, “no less than for now, if only for this present day, you're freed from the miracle potions, powders and pills. If just for this day, you are not among the many walking dead.” Or my buddy Anna David, who's an editor at The Repair, a web-based addiction and restoration magazine to which I steadily contribute, and creator of several books, including Occasion Girl and Falling for Me. Anna poignantly remembers “my shock over the ability than booze had… it was the best discovery of my life.” And Ruth Fowler, one other Repair contributor and creator of Girl Undressed, delivers up a brilliantly indifferent story of her life as an addict on both coasts and just about in all places else, which begins with the line, “I gravitated to the fucked up writers.”

Then there are the contributors I don’t know however want I did, like co-editor Diana Raab, a registered nurse and award-successful poet, as well as co-author of Writers and Their Notebooks, who gives a poem to her grandmother: “Your ashen face and blond bob/raveled upon white sheets/on the stretcher held by paramedics/flippantly greedy every end, and tiptoeing.” Or another poet, B. H. Fairchild, author of the marvelous collection, Early Occult Reminiscence Techniques of the Lower Midwest: “When I would go into bars in those days/the onerous spherical faces would flip/to talk one thing like loneliness/however deeper, the rain spilling into gutters/or the sound of a car pulling away/in a second of sleeplessness just earlier than dawn.”

And more: Frederick Barthelme, creator of Double Down: Reflections on Playing and Loss. Stephen Jay Schwartz, finest-selling crime novelist  and former director of improvement for filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen. Writers Rachel Yoder, Victoria Patterson, David Huddle, and Scott Russell Sanders. Etc. This assortment is a rich brew of essay, poetry, and memoir. A tough guide, a brutal e book, a real heartbreaker with grit. Some individuals get stronger and rise; some don’t. It's a considerate and inventive compendium of addiction stories, and some of them will shock you. All of them are solidly written, laid out with an unrelenting realism.

Here it's, these authors are saying. This is the way it plays out. Unforgettable stuff.