Riverwood Poetry Series - Featuring Jen Gates November 28, 2009

Riverwood Poetry Series - Featuring Jen Gates

Jen Gates’ first collection of poems, Crazy Girl with Lighter, is a searingly honest depiction of its author’s descent into an underworld of drugs and strip joints, followed by a long, courageous return to the world of hope, joy and “at-onement” with the people dearest to her. This is the story of one remarkably resilient young woman, but it is also a legendary tale of innocence lost and rediscovered.

Of the book, Steve Straight has said, “Crazy Girl with Lighter has the feel of a memoir, but the language catches you with the surprises of good poetry. From a life, as the poet says, ‘some of it spent in hell,’ she has decided to stand naked in front of the truth, and what emerges are gritty, hard-won epiphanies. This book is the opposite of a suicide note: it is the kind of note you leave to announce why you have decided to live.”

Jen Gates has been a writer and artist all her life, but she began to concentrate on poetry only after dropping out of Smith College and into the depths of addiction and drug-related behavior. After many arrests and hospital stays, she is now in recovery from addiction, thanks to family, friends, AA, and poetry. Manchester Community College and Professor Steve Straight have been enormously important allies in her struggle.

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