E.J. Miller Laino is a tough, honest poet. She is liable to say anything. Her poems are startling, from their frank treatment of sex and death to the abundance of hard, true metaphors. This is more than a confrontation with daily pain and fear, however; these poems celebrate survival, the durability of family, the liberation of unheard voices, especially female and working-class voices. The poems of E.J. Miller Laino transcend, with all the power and beauty of flight. --Martín Espada

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1967 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

"These 56 essays, excerpts, short stories and poems, collected and reprinted by the three poet-editors from diverse sources, reflect how their authors -- music critic Greil Marcus, poets David Wojan and Donald Hall, early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe and many others -- have loved and internalized the Beatles and their music ... In his poem 'Portland Coliseum, ' Allen Ginsberg, for example, exultantly recounts attending an early Beatles concert. Indeed, the Beatles' very public February 9, 1964, appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show comes up again and again in these pages as a sort of mantra for a generation's coming of age (though Leonard Bernstein writes of how the four moptops overwhelmed a 46-year-old conductor on that winter night). Not all of the writers flatter the band -- witness Larry Neal's attempt to explain the Beatles' failure to capture the hearts of some African Americans, or Eric Gamalinda's wonderful yarn about the band's disastrous trip to the Philippines. For sheer fun and creativity, Timothy Leary's essay 'Thank God for the Beatles' alone justifies the price of admission. 'John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr are mutants ... Revolutionary agents sent by God, endowed by mysterious powers to create a new human species.' Yeah, yeah, yeah!"