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|  | | Before the City
This collection of poems, prose poems, and sudden fictions won the 2003 San Diego Book Award for Poetry. It is packed with award winning poems, including poems that won the Robert Browning Society
This book is packed with award winning poems, including poems that won the Robert Browning Society Award, The Academy of American Poets Award, and the Ann Field Poetry Prize. | |  | | Moloka'i Nui Ahina, Summers on the Lonely Isle
Julia Daniels, a Moloka'i pioneer woman of mixed blood, invites her grandsons Jeff and Ben to spend summers with her at her ranch. She shares the land with ex-husband Chipper, an alcoholic war hero with a life estate bordering the swamp. The boys roam a paradise of fishponds, waterfalls, and mountains with herds of deer. Jeff meets the kahuna woman who freezes pictures of her enemies, the transsexual who seduces the Chief of Police, the man who referees cock fights in Kaunakakai, the foxy divorcee who lives in the saddle room, and the prodigal grandfather who returns to woo Julia. These characters shape Jeff's sensibilities as he learns the secrets of his grandmother's wild past in Honolulu and the intensity of her struggles on the Lonely Isle.
My Irish mother was blessed with optimism. She believed in fate, blind luck, and the idea you could achieve anything if you loved doing it. The cup was half full. She loved to sing and dance and was convinced she would someday star in a Broadway musical. This dream remained despite my father's chidings it would never happen. Her dream would never die because it had become a life preserver that buoyed her spirits whenever she felt she was drowning in the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. When I was three, she took me out to our driveway in Honolulu and pointed at the rising su | |  | | PUNAHOU BLUES: a Hawaiian Novel
Growing up in Honolulu isn't all it's cracked up to be for Jeffrey Gill. After he gets into prestigious Punahou School, his rite of passage includes losing the babe of his dreams to the jerk he hates, surviving Killahaole Day, and getting pushed around by the school bully. In the world of academics, Jeff knows he's hardly Stanford material.
Uncle Sharkey teaches Jeff the sweet science and he beefs his arch enemy at Waialae Golf Course. He salvages his senior year by getting into a mainland college and taking a foxy girl to the Senior Prom. But he must wait until graduation night to find out if the feelings he has for her are mutual.
I left the car that morning thinking how hard it was for our father to praise us. He was quick to praise other kids but he seldom had anything good to say about Ben and me. I thought about his uncles putting on black face and popping out of the bushes to scare him. He'd told me about the beatings he'd received as a boy while being raised hanai by his grandmother in Kaimuki. When Granny had run out of money, she was forced to rent her porch to a star boarder named Dad Hinkle. Dad slept outside under the overhang with a mosquito net draped over him. He hated "numbah one boy" because he was |
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