The poems in “Made in U.S.A.” are taken from the five year period between 1990-1995. You will experience the roller coaster ride of childish fancy and drama of a 17-year-old depressive with an addictive personality and an insatiable “hunger”. You will be exposed to a view of the world through a know-it-all 22-year old’s beauty, sweetness, fear and naiveté. You will get an abruptly honest albeit ego-centric take on the 1991 graduating class of the “Prozac nation” because as it turns out, almost all of us were born without filters or lost them somewhere along the way. But above all, it’s just me turning out some poetry every night after whatever thing just happened in my life so let’s not get too serious about the whole thing.
It’s the same old story of a young American woman maturing in the early 90s with all the requisite passion, wonder, experimentation and joy which manage to manifest in sickness, laughter and in tears.
It’s the vital, yet almost completely irrelevant years in the progression and telling of our future adult lives. Our semi-final paths now chosen or at the very least in the process of being drawn whether by our own will or the will of those who shaped our earliest memories. The ones whose voices go with us for better or worse.
We have made decisions concerning the future and we are now faced with the paralyzing task of separating adulthood from our beloved childhood. We are now completely free to be whoever it is we want to be yet we struggle with remaining true to an identity partially created for us by our parents and our schools while protecting and nurturing the selves we are not yet.
And all of this while becoming what society deems a productive member ie. dreaming the American dream while daring to be a little different. Of course, anyone who knows me knows I’ve always been a little different.