Loaded Poetry

From the streets of Santa Cruz to San Quentin State Prison. From the needle to the page. Loaded Poetry is the debut collection from Thomas Farrell - a poet who didn't find his voice in a classroom, but in prison cells, on park benches, and under pine trees with an IV in his arm. Raw, unflinching, and at times darkly funny, these 25 poems span decades of addiction, incarceration, spiritual warfare, and hard-won redemption. Farrell writes about drug abuse, lost love, dead friends, recovery and the God he kept arguing with - and kept believing in - until he began to suspect that the divine he'd been searching for outside himself had been within him all along. That the light he was crawling toward was his own.

Loaded Poetry moves through four chapters - The Descent, Living In It, The Haunting, and Toward Light - tracing a life that should have ended several times over, and didn't. This is not confessional poetry. It's something rawer than that - a testimony, a warning, and occasionally a prayer. For the misfits. For the forgotten. For anyone who has ever felt like one of society's disposures.