In Mad Dogs of Trieste, mythic figures glide past like giants over the landscape, showing the reader Janine Pommy Vega's passionate response to the death of her father, mother, friends and former times. Other poems repeat the call to get up, leave everything, go where one has never been.

Ms. Vega's writings are intensely autobiographical, following closely in the footsteps of her life-journey: they are the poetic record of her experience-hungry travels through the world and her spiritual retreats into herself; her work with public school children and delinquent youth, and with the inmates and staff of the New York State prison system; her friendships and her love affairs, her farewells and her lingering memories. For this major retrospective volume, she has selected the best lyrics, protests, portraits, and elegies from her first twenty-five years of writing.