Poetry. "The poems in PLASTICVILLE bring to mind the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, the collages of Kurt Schwitters. Trinidad shares with these artists an almost preternatural sensitivity to the artifacts and cast-offs of popular culture. And like these artists, his bits and pieces accumulate in surprisingly deft, resonant, and often melancholy ways. This is a poet who is able to imbue the commonplace with meaning and feeling while never compromising the integrity of his 'found' material. A fascinating and singular book"—Bernard Cooper. "Reading PLASTICVILLE is intensely pleasurable, it appeals to one's ever-present childhood, though it mysterious emotional content is not just childlike and not just happy. And there is an unwavering light in all of Trinidad's work that turns individual words into objects, new facts"—Alice Notley.

Author City: Chicago, IL USA

David Trinidad (born 1953) is an American poet. Trinidad was born in Los Angeles, California. In the early 1980s, he was one of a group of poets who were active at the Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California. Other members of this group included Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, and Amy Gerstler. As editor of Sherwood Press, he published books by Cooper, Flanagan, Gerstler, Tim Dlugos, Alice Notley, and others. In 1988, Trinidad relocated to New York City. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in 1990. He taught at Rutgers University, the New School, and Princeton University. His collection PLASTICVILLE (2000) was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. In 2002, Trinidad moved to Chicago to teach at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-founded the literary journal Court Green. In addition to his own books of poetry, Trinidad has edited A FAST LIFE: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TIM DLUGOS (Nightboat Books, 2011) and the earlier selected Powerless (Serpent's Tail, 1995), Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford (with Maxine Scates, 2001), and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (with Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, 2007). Trinidad's personal papers are archived at the Fales Library at New York University.