Devotions and Desecrations on the Downtown Bus

Poems that look out the windows of the bus - poems that remember last night - poems that commingle the two. Long time downtown poet, Punk and New Wave band leader, singer-songwriter, curator and publisher, JD Rage set about writing at least one poem each workday as the M-15 and M-9 buses shuttled her between her home and life on the Lower East Side,and her straight day job in Lower Manhattan, in the last couple years of the 1990's. Struggles with work, struggles with love and sex, struggles with health, and a creative artist's indomitable drive to make sense and/or art of it energize this collection of glimpses of an uncommon life.

Starting in the 1980's, JD Rage had played bass guitar and sang lead in several New York City bands - The Bandits, The Line-Up, Valkyries, and Disciples of Rage, among others - and Baby Boom, with whom she recorded the 1984 EP Basket Case [Rant Records V2279]. But JD had been to college, and even studied law briefly, and got a good office job with the State of New York, where she rose to a management position before declining health forced her to retire early.

    JD was co-editor of CURARE, a multimedia magazine put out by Venom Press, which she co-founded with Jan Schmidt. Together they published chapbooks by Larry Jones, Bruce Weber, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Susan Sherman, David Huberman and others. JD Rage was one of the co-hosts of the Sunday Open Series at ABC No Rio in New York in the 1990's. Towards the end of the century she created multiple versions of herself on America Online and explored kinkier relationships that inspired some of this writing. When she could, she liked walking to work; but when declining health forced her to ride the bus, she decided to put the time to good use and write a poem every day. Not long after writing these poems JD Rage had to take early retirement for health reasons, and was unable to fulfill her intention to publish this book. She died in 2018. But fellow New York poet and long-time friend Ptr Kozlowski, who played guitar in one of her bands, brought her work to completion to bring this poetic memoir to publication as she intended.