Weep Not, My Wanton: Stories & Poems

Weep Not, My Wanton collects eight short stories and a fifty-page poem, “WilleWorld,” all based on Maggie Dubris’ experience as an EMS worker in and around Times Square, New York City. Here, too, is an ambitious series of linked poems, “Toilers of the Sea,” concerning other themes: extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new.
Ms. Dubris tells us “how it is” in unheroic, often comic detail. Her stories and poems are full of strobe-lit images of the homeless, the lost, and the luckless in emergency rooms, hotel rooms, and subway tunnels.
The New York street photographer Weegee wrote: “When you find yourself [feeling] a bond between yourself and the people you document, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and their tears, you will know you are on the right track.” Maggie Dubris, in this debut collection, is most definitely on the right track.
“I used to think that working on an ambulance would be like being in a war,” she writes. “I thought that I would go up against death, face to face, and that I would win, because I wanted to so much. But that’s not how it is.”