The Chick at the Back of the Church

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.