The Chick at the Back of the Church

By Billie Livingston

Billie Livingston's poems drive straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.These jagged realities also collide with the innocence of childhood--a toddler being offered LSD by the next-door neighbor, a Catholic schoolgirl being dropped into the frontlines of a fierce abortion protest and a young woman trying to relax with a book in a park but instead facing an unwelcome exposure. Livingston also includes a selection of poems written from the disparate voices of a self-destructive family that eventually developed into her popular novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889711771
• ISBN13: 9780889711778
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.7" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Sharp and Funny

I'm not usually one to get drawn in by poetry. I read it out of duty most of the time. But I loved this book. Much of the poetry is narrative and playful -- Livingston's got a dark sense of fanciful irony that goes right for the jugular. The Chick of the Back of the Church could be read in one sitting and never lose the reader but I did enjoy plucking out one or two at a time to savour. So many of them are diamonds. I've found that I can read one to friends over dinner and the poem serves not only to bring laughter and thought to the table but as a catalyst to great conversation. It's a book you'll want to hang on to. WR