Burning of Los Angeles

By Samuel Maio

Takes a look at LA, where conventional rules of behaviour give way to the violence, lust, and chaos. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0943549442
• ISBN13: 9780943549446
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Truman State University Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

provocative title

As someone who lived in Los Angeles during the race riot of 1992, and the bush fires and earthquake-induced fires of 1994, the title is extremely provocative. So with some morbid trepidation, I started thumbing through this collection of poems. Apparently, Maio does or did live in Los Angeles. Several of the poems have explicit references that locals would recognise. Take for example "another heat wave ... more breathless September nights". The fabled Santa Ana, blowing warmly on a summer's night, no matter how late it is. As I write this, it is only early May, yet we have a Santa Ana. Even more a propos, today we had a major bush fire in the fabled Hollywood Hills, near Griffith Observatory. Another poem chooses Disneyland (the original in Anaheim) as a lead into parodying some American attitudes and icons. Not a hard thing to do with Disneyland. Overall, many of the poems exude a cynicism that may come from living too long in Los Angeles. A dystopic thread does run through the book. With sidebars explicitly evoking such seminal and gloomy works as West's Day of the Locust. To be sure, not all the poems are set in Los Angeles. But enough are to give good local flavour. The collection does not deal especially heavily or explicitly with fires and destruction. More of an understated approach. Whether you are disappointed by this depends on your predilictions.

Southern (California) Gothic

A traditionalist and formalist at heart, Maio crafts with consummate skill poems both starkly personal yet thematically universal and culturally transcendent. Never in a collection has the southern coast of California, its people, its landscapes, its deceptive allure, been so vividly portrayed through poetry. Maio's personas are by turns confident, vulnerable, and utterly and unfailingly human. The Burning of Los Angeles remains a book I continue to pick up off the bookcase and reread, each time with newfound pleasure and astoundment, as the lines gain even greater power and the themes acquire more profound implications.