The Beautiful: Collected Poems [Paperback]

Michelle Tea (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2003

“Tea writes with a raw-hearted, wry but wide-eyed ebullience, rendering dyke bohemia with intense, gritty, glittering romanticism.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Before penning her contemporary classic Valencia, Tea wrote wonderfully honest narrative poems, which she self-published in small editions, now collected here for the first time. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004 and a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A young stalwart of San Francisco's queer underground, a onetime "lesbian feminist radical activist prostitute," and a survivor of Boston's roughest neighborhoods, Tea has won plaudits with novels (the Lambda Award-winning Valencia) and a memoir (The Chelsea Whistle) which draw on her gritty experience. Her first success, though, came through the performance-poetry scene: Tea not only organized the famed SF Sister Split reading series but made a splash with her own readings and chapbooks in the mid-1990s. This expansive and fiery volume collects those chapbooks along with unpublished texts from those years, when Tea wrote (and performed) in-your-face work with a raw fanzine feel. "Listen, I come from pavement... here is my poetic apology," one says; another asks, "aren't all the poems/ a salvaged piece/ of something awful." Snappy sentences try hard to shock ("straight girls of America, I am lighting/ votive candles for your ignored and/ misused clitorises") while titles sometimes tell us what to expect ("On Learning My Lover Was a Whore And It's All Her Fault"). Tea's tough talk owes something to Nikki Giovanni, though older art works of any sort are kept at arm's length; instead, the poems make vivid Tea's own life, from the household she left in New England (with a leering father and a codependent mother) through college and the Tucson sex trade, to the happier life she made for herself on the West Coast, where queer activism does not rule out risky seductions, cigarettes and self-doubt. Hers is an art of emotions and direct statements, casual and harsh at once.
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Review

"Tea has a way of making you hold your breath in wonder..." -- JT LeRoy

"Tea's poetic constructions get their muscle from the captured moments of short-story narratives. " -- Bay Area Reporter, January 15, 2004

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc. (December 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916397890
• ISBN-13: 978-0916397890
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #29 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Gay

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of poetry that reads like a novel, December 28, 2003

By 

Allison Beltz "papercuts & promises" (mountain view, ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Beautiful: Collected Poems (Paperback)

This book of Michelle Tea's poems published previously in chapbook form is a breathless collection of her experiences. Many of them allude to circumstances and people found in her other books, placing the poems within familiarity. Her poems are gripping and fiercely feminist, unapologetic in their honesty. Towards the end, several poems tend to mention writing poems, choosing to honor Tea's reality but losing some of the emotional immediacy for me as a reader. Still the poems are deeply passionate and definitely worth delving into if you are a fan of Michelle Tea's other work.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It really is Beatiful..., March 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Beautiful: Collected Poems (Paperback)

Passionate stories told in poetry form, these tiny gems sparkle on the page. If you're familiar with Tea's other works, you'll see their origins here. Whether she's writing about advice for the lovelorn or life in Tucson and San Francisco, her strong voice comes through. Of course, if you're a reader with a prejudice against poetry maybe you shouldn't venture beyond Tea's prose. But if you have an open mind and love Tea's writing, don't miss this book!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic Voice of Queer Subculture, May 16, 2009

By 

Carissa A. Boak - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Beautiful: Collected Poems (Paperback)

Tea has been called a voice of the queer urban subculture emerging as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals are becoming somewhat more noticed in mainstream media.

And this is what this collection of poems seems to be primarily about: Tea's relationship with America which is like that of a codependant woman in a somewhat abusive relationship.

In the title poem of the collection, "The Beautiful", she writes as if America is a girl she is dating: "can I process/my bad relationship/with America/can we go to/couple's counseling."

In the poem "McDonalds" the girl America takes her money while offering limited choices for spending what she has left: "I ate the burger/because I only had/two dollars/I had three but one/for the bus."

Tea's poetic constructions get their in-your-face punch from the short-story narrative style of her poems. As with her other works, the poems vividly illustrate her life experiences and memories. Those unused to her style of combining her compassion with her frankness may view her as offensive or shocking.

In her poem "Johns Who Don't Pay Are Rapists" she writes about some of her experiences as a prostitute: "but with a gun that flashes/on the mirrored walls and/what do they do they throw me/onto the bed and/it is about consent".

Michelle Tea continues to a be a loud and strong feminist voice for straight and gay women alike.