“I am on the Bus,” Rage writes; we jump right on, riding with her through a section of lower Manhattan, where she lived, to her job in the Federal building at City Hall, riding back about 25 years. References to the Central Park woman being raped, the TWA plane crash, newspapers being hawked, Bob Dole and the Clintons situate the timeline in lieu of specific dates given.

Driven by an assortment of drivers she is at the mercy of as it maneuvers its way through traffic merges effortlessly with personal obstacles she confronts on her daily struggle to survive: a diabetic on insulin, a recovering addict, an artist, above all. The bus is what keeps her moving through her life to a death she envisions getting closer. There are also days “the bus will not save me,” she writes.

 “I have disintegrated into/ dating perverts/ dreaming of going to New Orleans/ to be beaten and hung and smashed/ into oblivion…” What does save her is her ability to step outside herself, view a current situation as “only (her) interpretation/ of the circus on this one day and nothing more.” She is strong enough to resist what tempts her, “to venture toward that place within (herself) again.” (156)

Bits & pieces of NY like confetti twirl around the poems: the Yankees winning the series, a water main break, McDonald’s wrappers, fears the bus turning might flip as it rounds a corner, passengers injured sliding down an emergency chute, streets packed, and having to skip lunch, flow in a smooth stream.

It is a tribute to her skill how she segues from one to the other so effortlessly we barely notice the transition. Often late, she observes Chinese truckers, even worse than movie crews, refusing to get out of the bus’s way, as it heads down Allen Street, passing lines of people outside a methadone clinic, “a reminder of times “I/ came in straight from the/ after-hour joints…drowning/ three cans of orange soda…to cure my alcohol induced dehydration.” (3)

The bus can be bumpy or smooth, varying like the weather and not under her control. Almost every section, of the 241 numbered “Devotions” has a reference to weather, she sometimes feels in accord with and other times doesn’t. “It should be warm by now/ but I feel like I have been/ too long in the freezer/ chopping ice from the walls.” (29)

Fragments of her past emerge amidst the rumblings of trucks. It’s a nice spring day, but her body “is wracked with various pains.” While others are dressed for spring, her only clothes are jackets she calls “too punk” and reminds her of a day she and a boyfriend stole books they sold to get money for drugs. (34)

The smooth rhythm of the bus “tugs (her) gently away/ from rough memories.” She chooses not to “take much/ of a chance with (her life) and after riding a few more blocks “…’go(es) to be/ normal.” (34) The routes the bus takes through lower Manhattan vary, depending on traffic and other upheavals; it is what propels the speed at which the poems move: from lingering on a single observation to barreling through a long list, melding with the poet’s emotions.

Just as she’s dependent on the bus, the bus relies on dispatchers to keep it running on time and using the most efficient routes. (68) She interacts with them as well and falls in love with one on sight (179)…“until he let the/ City Hall M-15…take off after slamming its door in (her) face.” The fantasy is over. Attempts to find love now take place over computer and phone lines. Bus fantasies stop when “real boys…ask her out on pool dates.”

“Everything is part of an endless/ repetition of everything else,” she writes. (228) With The repetition of streets and scenes comes a deepening insight into the poet’s sensibility and the world she finds herself stuck in. Our angle of vision keeps shifting as we continue on this bus ride down the same streets which are never exactly the same.

The 2^nd part of this collection, “Desecrations,” focuses on her various S&M encounters with men she calls “slaves” in her continued search for love, or if not exactly love, to feel wanted. “My domination dreams of bondage/ and control diminishes with/ the latest meeting,” she writes of a man whom she “…never imagined wouldn’t like (her)” in the assumption that she “would/ be the one to pick and choose.” (12) They can do nothing right. Compliments are dismissed, even turned against those for saying what she doesn’t believe. “I am such a mean Bitch” she says when they claim to like her poetry, “because none of them have/ the concentration it takes to read a simple poem.” There is no winning.

She is still riding on the City Hall bus in this section, but it is primarily in the background as she focuses more on her feelings of being “a real loser,” (16) struggling to combat loneliness and not spend holidays alone or, as she did during one Halloween, in a pulmonary ward. 

She calls her father a day after his 80^th birthday, “having been mired in the throes of desecration,” a man who doesn’t really know about her tattoos and piercings, or her “penchant for dressing men up/ like frilly Barbie dolls” because if he did, her father “…would not wish/ to talk to (her) at all.”

The gulls are still hovering around the bus, still looking down on her, a continued presence she can’t ignore.

I found this section, which consists of 47 parts, less gripping than the first longer one, and might have been better served by being incorporated in it. The endless repetition of what she wants and ensures she won’t get by her requirements from the mostly younger men she chooses, turns on itself rather than adds or deepens our understanding of her and her life.

A minor criticism of this beautifully produced collection of poems painstakingly edited by Ptr Kozlowski; to get on this bus with JD Rage, to ride all the way with her, is to take a trip readers will never forget. I know that I won’t.