Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones - Rilegato

"Love, H is a very tender correspondence, augmented by Jones's running commentary between two deeply loyal 'no nonsense' friends, both strong women, artists, mothers. This delicate weave runs adjacent to the lives and dynamics of the New American Poetry and its inspired players. The affinities create a jazz track of quotidian life, literary and visual art talk, heartbreak, survival, politics, social justice, and illuminating details from place: traveling from Colchester (UK) and Gloucester to the Lower East Side. This is a wonderful addition to Hettie Jones's memoir How I Became Hettie Jones. This is one for the Archive." -- Anne Waldman, Poet, Artistic Director of the Kerouac School Summer Writing Program "Love, H, a lucid compendium of epistles, postcards, and e-mails, depicts an intimate account of the lives and minds of two artists. The straightforward acumen of Beat poet Hettie Jones (New York City) and sculptor Helene Dorn (Gloucester) cumulate into a poignant dialogue that critiques and probes a unique body of shared feelings during the post-Beat movement and its legacy. Love, H is life on the page. The day to day, with gaps and silences, portrays a psychological and spiritual map of these two speakers who aptly refer to the post-Beat landscape as Boyland. These pages of joy and pain add up to more than two full hearts and minds caught at a turning point in America. Two friends sort out the fray. Their playful certainty embodies wisdom. Lively, and at times even taciturn, the two give us a shared truth as witnesses. This correspondence of more than forty years is personal and political, and without trying creates a collage of experience that grows into an American portrait." -- Love, H reveals the struggles and contradictions of being an aspiring female artist, a wife, and a mother during the tumultuous sixties. Here are two cool 'chicks'-in this case writer Hettie Jones and painter Helene Dorn-running in the highly competitive, male-dominated, bohemian circles of New York/San Francisco/& Beyond. It's a gritty and seductive world, referred to by Jones as 'Boyland,' where smart, creative women are expected to be seen but not heard. These candid letters-framed by Hettie Jones's own eloquent and insightful recollections-are a deeply moving ode to friendship, as well as a window to an incredible time of conflict, social change, and artistic flourishing in America." --Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems "

Hettie Jones is the author of numerous books, including her memoir of the Beat scene How I Became Hettie Jones; the poetry collection Drive; and the young adult Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music. She has published in many newspapers and magazines, including the Village Voice, Global City Review, and Ploughshares. She currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at The New School, the 92nd Street Y, and the Lower Eastside Girls Club, and she previously taught at several colleges and universities in New York and elsewhere. Jones lives in New York City.