Penfield Prep is a satire on the wealthy private school in America and all the inherent zaniness that goes with it.
Hypatia Hogan is driven to New Hampshire by her father, Mick, in his old broken-down Rambler for a job interview at Penfield Prep, almost convinced that she will not get the position because her father had just told her that he had mailed a newspaper clipping with her resume describing a near riot recently when she was chosen Miss Hoboken over some local favorites.
Little did she know that the headmaster and English department Chair had their fingers crossed that she would not turn the job down as 47 others had after they learned that the opening had been created because the last teacher was sent to Penfield Prep's private mental institution after the school had driven him mad. And he was not the only Penfield Prep teacher and alumnus at the funny farm.
Excerpt
The dilapidated old Rambler groaned and creaked its way up the last few feet of yet another long, winding hill in southern Vermont. It was the heart of New England's dazzling autumn, the trees and foliage rich with bright reds, oranges, and browns, but the driver of the struggling auto was not impressed by the grandeur of the early October afternoon.
"This car is a roach," he proclaimed angrily to the cows, horses, and maple trees on the roadsides about three miles east of Bennington. "An A-1 lemon. I shoulda never listened to that old haybag from Jefferson Street. Do you remember the bill of goods she sold me, Hypatia?"
His companion, an attractive young woman in her early twenties, had been daydreaming, but the mention of her name brought her back to the present.
"She said she hardly used the car, except to take her mother to novenas."
"Yeh, that's where she pulled a fast one. I didn't know what a novena was. I thought it was something like Bingo where the old haybags meet every Friday night.When you told me it meant going nine days in a row to church, I could see how she turned this car into a shitbox."
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry is a powerful literary vision of rare scope, beauty and emotional intensity composed of stories and poems that flow in and out of each other like the most lucid and articulate of dreams. These are portraits and studies of
