Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints

Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints is a memoir told in a collage of monologues and poems about awkward grieving, bad judgment, and important stoners. Through lyrical passages, conversational stories, diary excerpts (and one silly sonnet), an artist's life is revealed. A range of voices that are funny, depressed, deluded, idealistic, cynical, wise, compassionate, and warmly bitchy tell the story of a person determined to make a good life out of her creative mistakes, family traumas, and clumsy relationships. Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints is the first book written by Annie La Ganga that she didn't print and staple together herself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1597091553
• ISBN13: 9781597091558
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Moving prose-poetry from a preternaturally gifted writer

La Ganga's writing is as unclassifiable---and as good---as anything I've ever read. It is a memoir, certainly, but it also contains vivid hallmarks of other kinds of written expression---the precise casting and narrative harrow of great short fiction, the haunted music and sharp pictures of great poetry, and the subtle but unassailable logic of great essays. Many of these 34 pieces---I don't what else to call them---fold Angela-Carter-style fantastical bloodlust into the household wit of Erma Bombeck; others mix ornery Ikkyuan bawd with hilarious parodies of Pia Mellody-style self-help advice; still others are simply naked, sad theories of dreams. Here's something short, entitled "Prayer," but which could be so many other things---poem, epitaph, demand, lyric, prescription, riddle---that is characteristic of La Ganga's concise, devastating, intimate writing: You know all my weirdness and wishes, all my laughable lusts. Protect my from the car keys, and other agents of myself. Apparently, the book's original subtitle was "Prose-Poetry by Annie La Ganga," but the publisher changed it to "Memoirs," because the latter genre supposedly sells better than the former. The book, of course, incorporates all three descriptors, but they are each hopelessly inadequate---like describing "The Girl with the Wineglass" as a Dutch oil on canvas. (The book might've been as well off with no subtitle at all.) No matter; the fact that so unique a literary feast can even exist is as delectable as the feast itself.

True shaking words...

This little book keeps me sane when the daily routines and bills, and people, and all the garbage of the orderly "normal" life threatens to swipe me. I open it on a random page and read until I calm down and return to my senses. I love it and I am developing dependency to it. It is hard to say what the style of the short pieces of text is because they are unusual. They look like short stories and sound like poetry but they are neither. The words are true, deep and hones, and awakening. It is beautiful and at the same time shocking and raw. However, if you are the type of person, that goes to church on Sunday, and reads love stories before bed after watching an episode of Friends, you may be better off to stick to your routine. This book may be to much to swallow.