From Publishers Weekly
Di Prima, perhaps the best known and certainly among the most talented of the beat generation poets, captures the heady atmosphere of New York's avant-garde community in the 1950s and 1960s, while rendering her own life with intimacy and grace. Born in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, she remembers her Italian immigrant grandmother with great affection. But she describes frightening incidents from her earliest childhood: her father, a sullen, brooding, man, once beat her until her nose bled; her relationship with her mother was equally abusive. In elementary school, di Prima was bullied relentlessly; it was not until she entered Hunter High School for gifted students that she found a circle of friends; there, reading the great poets, she resolved to become a poet herself. Leaving Swarthmore College after what she perceived as unproductive years, di Prima returned to New York City, and embarked on an independent life as a writer. She describes her bohemian lifestyle love affairs with men and women, experiments with drugs with honesty and wit. Friend to many of the best known figures of the beat world, including Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde and LeRoi Jones, di Prima found fulfillment in her work as an editor and poet, and as a single mother. She tells her story well, skillfully interweaving events with lyrical commentary on her inner life. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Poet di Prima chronicled her reign as queen of the Beats in her famously explicit Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968). Here she presents an equally frank self-portrait but on a far grander scale, delving so deeply into her past she transcends the personal to illuminate the primal cultural and psychological issues of the fifties and sixties. She was born in New York in 1934 and survived a brutal home life. Precocious and already committed to the writing life as a teenager, she dropped out of college to live a bohemian life in which lovers of both sexes and artist friends of all kinds came and went in a great swirl of Eros and creativity. Experience was valued above security, art was sacrosanct, and women writers were expected to behave like men. But di Prima wanted a child. Her recounting of the dramatic events of her life are riveting in themselves--whether the topic is her struggle as a single mother and woman writer; or the pain and passion of her affair with Leroi Jones, father of one of her five children; or the difficulties of her marriage to a gay man--but, finally, it's di Prima's electrifying perceptions into the nature of sex and love, men and women, art and beauty, drugs and spirituality, and freedom and commitment that keep readers glued to the page. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

An evocative, gritty memoir by the leading woman writer of the Beat Generation.

In this rich and passionate memoir, influential poet Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Only by heroic effort was she able to break away from her intense Brooklyn Italian family to follow through on the lifelong commitment to poetry she made in high school. Immersed in the proto-Beat world of Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, she emerged as a major force, not only establishing herself as a poet, but also coediting the influential literary newsletter, The Floating Bear, and cofounding The Poet's Theatre.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman chronicles the intense, creative cauldron of those years as the Beat movement emerged on both coasts, and the country accelerated into the sixties. Poetry, painting, dance, and theater flowed into one another, and well-known figures from all those worlds-including Merce Cunningham, Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Trisha Brown, and Franz Kline-move through her story. Di Prima was a deliberate single parent at a time when that was unheard of, and her relationships and sexuality were as revolutionary as her writing. This is a powerful and unique remembering of how one woman's life revealed itself to her.

Author Bio: Diane di Prima is the author of thirty-four books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into sixteen languages. Born in New York City in the 1930s, she currently lives in San Francisco, where she works as a writer and teacher. Her most recent books include Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems and Loba, Books I and II.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Newsday

...a...portrait of this singularly talented young woman...who has grown through her friendships and her art toward maturity and self-discovery.

San Jose Metro

... Recollections is di Prima's best nonfiction work...

Book Magazine

Not unlike poet di Prima's verse, this memoir is daring, honest, simultaneously colloquial and lyrical—qualities that lend it authenticity and verve. By freely admitting that she can't possibly remember everything, di Prima captures the reader's trust and interest. Structurally the book is as elliptical as di Prima's New York life during the 1950s and '60s, a time when the art world throbbed with originality. The innovative memoir mixes linear narrative, dreams and journal entries and describes the author's bold, sudden moves between the West and East Coast, as well as her love affairs, her writing and the challenges of raising five children while often alone and poor. Although the central focus is di Prima's bohemian lifestyle up to 1965, the most compelling part of the book is the author's portrait of her Italian-American family, their "immigrant fear," secrets and pain. It is out of this background that di Prima courageously turns life into art. —Denise Gess (Excerpted Review)

Publishers Weekly