Transit Line Paradigm

Jess Eternamente Fraga is the eternally perceptive observer. She sees people, then, perceives them in all their truth, beauty, ugliness and goodness-and of no one is she more observant than herself. In her first award winning chapbook You'll Never Tip a Go-Go Boy in This Town Again, she introduced her readers, with such love, empathy and clarity, to the young male hustlers of Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, CA, most of whom had run away from home or were driven away by parents who rejected them. In her second collection, Transit Line Paradigm, which, I am proud to say, was also begun in my Creative Writing workshop at Santa Monica College, she takes her readers on bus rides across Los Angeles, into the "heart of darkness" of Los Angeles, and characterizes the diverse people she has encountered on her journeys riding the RTD. They are unique and colorful human beings, most of us would never come into contact with in our daily lives. In this collection she tells us funny, witty, inspiring, and sometimes, disturbing poetic tales, and as it was with her "boys" on Santa Monica Blvd., we learn in this new collection to love, to have compassion and a greater understanding for those we may never have thought to love. -Mario Rene Padilla