false 328750 0 0 606163 1932360255 9781932360257 2 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176237437m/606163.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176237437s/606163.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/606163.Skels_A_Novel 4.57 7 Skels is an inventive yet realistic portrait of the urban underworld from a paramedic's point of view. The story is based on an unusual idea: What would happen if the ambulance world was permeated with the works of past authors, and the homeless patients (the "skels") carried the consciousness of the writers? What would a paramedic do if she met a great poet, dirty and covered with lice, and was granted the chance to save him — not from dying but from his own life? A funny, gritty urban thriller, Skels pits corrupt cops, bumbling firemen, drunken softball tournaments, and careening transvestites against this surreal literary environment, realistically portraying a New York City of 1979 rich with an ancient truth that is all but invisible from the outside. The characters within it must face brutality and illness, vengeance and despair, and find help in tenderness and the threads that connect them to the past.</div>]]> 328750 4.47 15 2 2004 1267812 0966632826 9780966632828 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1182375808m/1267812.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1182375808s/1267812.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1267812.WillieWorld 4.50 4 328750 4.47 15 2 20664 4.40 472 57 1998 1317190 1574231812 9781574231816 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1317190.Weep_Not_My_Wanton_Stories_Poems 5.00 2
"I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war," writes Maggie Dubris, a longtime paramedic in and around Times Square. "I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that's not how it is."

In this, her debut collection, Dubris tells us "how it is" in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems - full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels - are the verbal equivalents of Weegee's photographs. It was Weegee who wrote: "When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you life and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track." Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track. Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, "WilleWorld," all based on Dubris' experience as an EMS worker in New York City. Here, too, is a ambitious series of linked poems, "Toilers of the Sea," concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new.]]> 328750 4.47 15 2 2002