Jess Eternamente Fraga is the eternally perceptive observer. She sees people, then, perceives them in all their truth, beauty, ugliness and goodness-and of no one is she more observant than herself. In her first award winning chapbook You'll Never Tip a Go-Go Boy in This Town Again, she introduced her readers, with such love, empathy and clarity, to the young male hustlers of Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, CA, most of whom had run away from home or were driven away by parents who rejected them. In her second collection, Transit Line Paradigm, which, I am proud to say, was also begun in...

In exploring memory, Jess Enternamente Fraga does not allow memory to confine or define her. The poems in Liberation with a Memory do not come from a place of nostalgia, nor deal with the disillusionment that nostalgia often creates in the soul. As she writes "No apologies, no regrets." Jess's memories liberate her from the past, a past that often seeks to restrict, as past experiences reimagined often do by frustrating our attempts at self-understanding. In exploring those indelible memories that help to define who we are, she finds that, by writing "of them" in beautifully crafted verse,...