Laurel Ann Bogen

Laurel Ann Bogen is the author of ten books of poetry and short fiction, including Washing a Language; Fission; The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies and Rag Tag We Kiss. Her New and Collected Poems is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Since 1990 she has been an instructor of poetry and performance for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where she received the Outstanding Instructor of the Year award in 2008. Well known for her lively readings, Bogen has read her work at Cornell University, The Savannah College of Art and Design, The Knitting Factory (NYC), The L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority, MOCA and LACE. She is a recipient of the Pacificus Foundation’s Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize, two awards from the Academy of American Poets and a 2011 Pushcart Prize nomination. Her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies.


All Books

Black lettering over a green background reads Psychosis in the Produce Department by Laurel Ann Bogen over the image of a white baby-like figure riding in a grocery cart while giving blood.
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Psychosis in the Produce Department

Laurel Ann Bogen

Publication Date: April 7, 2016

$18.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-993-6

Description:

Named the ‘Nearly undisputed Empress of Southern California poetry,’ Laurel Ann Bogen writes poetry for those who think they don’t like poetry. The accessible and relevant poems in Psychosis in the Produce Department—which can be both witty and intense—will make believers of us all.


Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015 gathers the best work from Laurel Ann Bogen’s previous ten books as well as new and unpublished poetry. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal and most crucially, accessible—genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen.


Readers are also given the unique opportunity to experience the full power of Bogen’s critically acclaimed poetry performance through ten included QR codes that link to audio files of select poems in the collection.


ADVANCE PRAISE


“Laurel Ann Bogen’s poems are lethal and smoking. If she is often painfully conscious at what we do to each other in the name of love, her poems are also rambunctious insignias of hope and courage. Psychosis in the Produce Department is an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane. . . .a great pleasure to read.”—Steve Kowit

White text stating Washing a Language poems by Laurel Ann Bogen over a green background atop a painting of forest and mountains along a river.
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Washing a Language

Laurel Ann Bogen

Publication Date: May 1, 2004

$8.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1888996-90-6

Description:

A classic of Los Angeles poetry.


“Laurel Ann Bogen is an admirable poet with a distinctive voice. In this fascinating book, again and again she transforms her moments of joy, the wounds she has suffered, into a mouth, speaking her terse and immaculate poems, and often, miraculously, breaking into song.”—Edward Field