"We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood"

Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood



“Hands are tongues on the graveyard shift or are they wings?”

Lisa Beatmen, Manufacturing America





It’s not so much that Lisa Beatman’s soon-to-be American citizens laboring for factory wages and learning English in Manufacturing America, resemble those of Thomas’ small town in Wales; it’s just that I can hear the same kind of radio play rise from the vividly acute portraits of this book. While Thomas was despairing, ironic and a dreadful alcoholic from that lyrically poetic and estranged country, Beatman and her characters are for the most part, strong, cool and sober, give or take the indulgence of a Krispy Kreme donut. They are, however, more eccentric and varied in their struggle for survival. And that includes one industriously dreamy mouse who appears three times in the book, as a kind of shadow play from the very bottom rung. All creatures, afterall, must find their niche and scrap their way through the factory floors that once kept America in full industrial tilt. What’s amazing is the way Beatman captures the language and expressive nature of their day-to-day grind, each detail lacquered on to a beautiful mosaic of faces and voices and souls. Though their jobs may be outsourced, we are left with a sense of tenacity and high spirit from this community.





Many near perfect poems, an arc that sustains, and a subject that deserves much light, levity and attention paid to it. This book is a winner. As the daughter of an Italian immigrant-- who would have died to play baseball with the Red Sox and became a Labor Lawyer instead-- I can fully appreciate Lisa Beatman’s grasp of these tough, savvy and wonderful people.





Doug Holder’s Ibbetson St. Press evolves yearly into an ever more fascinating literary enterprise.





Lisa Beatman is now managing adult literacy programs at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. She won Honorable Mention for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg International Poetry Peace Prize, and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil. She may be reached at lisabeatman@yahoo.com.





Lo Galluccio


Author of “Hot Rain,” a poetry chap


on Singing Bone Press & two solo CDs,


“Being Visited” and “Spell on You.”

In her fascinating poem cycle, Gloria Mindock jolts back into memory the roots of El Salvador's present day violence. Mindock coaxes to the page the voices of the dead who lie, less in peace, than in restless obsession with the atrocities they suffered. She brings forth as well the voices of the living who seem startled to find that they died somewhere between the horrors they witnessed and the grave they have yet to lie down in. Blood Soaked Dresses is a beautiful, harrowing first book.

--Catherine Sasanov