Description
Poetry. A COMMUNION OF SAINTS takes us on a harrowing trek through denial, descent, and resurrection in the Honolulu gay community of the 1980s. This book of prose poems, each glossed with a Biblical quotation, is an extended elegy for those who frequented the bar Meg Withers tended. She tends it--and them--still in this echo chamber of voices and stories. The oldest of five children born to a Navy father and Italian Baroque Opera Drama Queen mother, Meg Withers grew up in a small northern California town full of Italian relatives and friends. She has traveled a lot, living in England and all over the continental U.S.A. She lived in Hawai'i for nine years, tending bar at Hamburger Mary's, when many gay men she knew were dying of AIDS. She earned her MFA from San Francisco State and currently teaches at Gavilian Community College in Gilroy, California.