Back Seat Baby

Book excerpt: "Nicca Ray's poems turn nightmares into idylls of 1970s nights, she turns fear into intimacy and Hollywood moonlight into the sun's relentless exposure, heat. Her poetry is precise, beautiful, delicate as a blown-glass angel, concrete and painful...she delves bravely into the depths of her own psyche, of her body, she makes me see Los Angeles as a revelatory realm of glittering runaway scars and familial talons, the warmth of the mother, the progenitor, in her magical words absence is music, rich with unceasing, kinetic passion. A magnificent collection." - Tammy Faye (cabaret performer extraordinaire - Tammy Faye Starlite persona, repertoire renditions of Nico, Marianne Faithfull, et.al.); "You don't have to grow up here to find Ray's poetic odyssey so familiar. Hollywood is part of our DNA, inextricably bound up with our own personal histories and traumas - parental neglect, divorce, alcoholism, addiction. Ray's Jungian road map shows us life in a city that is not so much Dream Factory as fast food drive-thru...Ray finds gold in the collective swamplands of our souls. She nails that "feeling weird" feeling that had a lot of us gravitating towards like-minded misfits, all desperate to find solace within the Tribe of Cool. [Her father] Nicholas Ray's rebel was famously without a cause. Nicca Ray's rebel has one: to wake up from the recurring nightmare and change the narrative; to write her way out of the mausoleum; to walk, resurrected, with ease on the streets below as well as the clouds above." - Ann Magnuson; "Back Seat Baby is a brutally beautiful account of a child who knew the smell of sex and the taste of whiskey, yet still exploded in colors. The shell of her chocolate Easter bunny, forgotten in the butter drawer, her self-described 'blankness in the darkest space, ' her 'thick purple tights melting bone' are some of the saddest lines I've ever read..." - Puma Perl (writer/poet, "Birthdays Before and After"); "Some people write to simply, unpretentiously, tell stories, and that is fine. Perhaps they achieve...grace, perhaps they do not. You can't push it like a brand new product for consumption. Intentionally trying to be a conduit for that grace, to force it and portray it as an aspirational thing - even a commodity - is the worst thing a writer can do. Because it kills its guileless spontaneity and purity of vision. Nicca does not ever have to worry about that. Her survival from childhood, her acceptance of unspeakable pain and her resulting grace has enabled her to achieve a transcendence of the all-too-ordinary monstrosity of everyday life. She shows it in her poetry. " - Chris D. (author of "No Evil Star," "Shallow Water," "Mother's Worry", singer/songwriter of the bands, The Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen); "Back Seat Baby is a windrush of boulevards that ought to be glittering, but aren't, of birthdays ruined because you realize you have no other mother, no other home. And oh, so much more. A beautifully poignant heartbeat of how things were instead of how you needed them to be. And, of course, the poems are dripping with all that California. From start to finish, gilded with gorgeous imagery and truth, this collection will stay with you for a very long time." - Francine Witte, (author of Cafe Crazy and The Theory of Flesh) "Nicca Ray's poetry shines through windows fly specked with glory in Topanga Canyon with fresh icons of L.A. from the litter of star sidewalks. Rimbaud with blue hair. Clean sheets, sunny beach, ruffles with ridges, big wave Malibu. 'If art is the devil's work' she has no fear of burning in hell. The High Noon of poetry." - Charles Plymell (author of "Apocalypse Rose" and "Last of the Moccasins")