Brokedown Palace is out now from Subpress!!
I was a 911 paramedic in New York City throughout the AIDS epidemic, the crack years, and the attack on the World Trade Center. Though I participated in historical events, most of my time was spent in places that never made the news. Homeless hotels, shelters, subway tunnels. Places where throw-away people lived. The media narrative of their lives, or of the life of a paramedic, didn’t fit my experience at all. The older I get, the more I understand that I have a responsibility to document the truth of my era and not let it turn into a smoothed over, inevitable path into the present day. The future is encoded in the past. But only if the past is remembered clearly. That’s my mission as a writer. My past brought us to Trump and the edge of a great extinction. What is the past we’re making now carrying us towards?
(Praise for BrokeDown Palace)
Brokedown Palace is Maggie Dubris’s ode to St. Clare’s, the Hell’s Kitchen hospital where she worked as an EMT for more than 25 years, until it closed. She weaves together prose and verse, memory and reportage, documents and testimonies into an epic ride that takes in the crumbling Times Square of the ’80s, the parade of odd characters that passed through, the ad hoc expedients demanded by a hospital without funds, and then the crushing onslaught of AIDS. Her book is absorbing, funny, lyrical, and transcendentally sad, a stunning poetic monument to a New York City that no longer exists. —Luc Sante
In any great work—one that fuses the imagination with memories—there is something deeper to be discovered about yourself and the time you live. Brokedown Palace is in that tradition if you allow it to be—it’s painfully alive about something that appears to be dead but if you just tilt your head a bit, glance out of the corner of your eye, step to one side, you will see it’s all there. It has jagged edges that feel punk with spaces in between that are like an invocation, a prayer, a reflection. It’s not easy but it’s rewarding, reminding us of our relationship to hope and fate. These tight, beautifully clear life sketches open in your mind as you read, less as settings but more as airy plunging ambiences in dreams. Dubris knows that you can’t show the whole world, but born of a fleeting moment like a snapshot, you can find the whole in the detail of her words. —from the Afterword by Antonino D’Ambrosio
(Praise for Skels)
“[Dubris's] New York has everything and nothing to do with the real world, which is a reminder of something very simple: books don't need to get all pompous about our social disasters in order to make the grandest possible statements about them. Skels floats completely free of those painful, tiresome conversations about who we're supposed to be and who we have to be. On a hot Manhattan night, with hydrants pumping in the streets and the sirens Dopplering off, Orlie's in the same ambulance with the rest of us, unconcerned with being a subject, an object, a woman, a character. “ The New York Times,
"A vivid and poetic novel that tells the story of a young EMT plunged into the jungle that is New York City in the steamy summer of 1979. With every call to save a life, Maggie Dubris-who worked as a 911 paramedic in Harlem and Hell's Kitchen throughout the '80s and '90s-enters a different and strange world…. A vivid rendering of the lives of New York's poorest and most invisible." The New York Post
“Dubris captures that hurried sense of absurdity that other authors, like Denis Johnson, have tackled in the emergency room-trauma story genre. And like Johnson, Dubris harnesses a dry, sick sense of humor... Skels conveys the overwhelming feelings one has during epic moments of tragedy." LA Weekly
WANT TO BUY SOME BOOKS? LINKS ARE BELOW.
SKELS is now available paperback or kindle
WillieWorld is out of print, unless you want to buy a signed copy here
And I have obtained all the copies of the Black Sparrow book, Weep Not, My Wanton. You can buy it at readings, or email me if you want to buy a copy.
Here’s a video I made for one of the poems in BrokeDown Palace