Perris, California

Poetry. "Norma Chapman's PERRIS, CALIFORNIA is pungent truth-telling, peopled by a call-girl cousin, ditzy aunts, grandmothers, lovers, her mother and father ('the fifth husband of his second wife'), in a voice unique to the time and this poet, the voice of a laconic rapier. These poems, often arising from the Great Depression and WWII, entertain, elucidate a life few readers will recognize, but all will revel in."—Gregg McBride

"In her uncompromising gaze at the realities of age and life and death, Chapman's poems reveal the immense vitality of a lively mind and give no quarter to the solemn pieties."—Jean Norhaus