Go Go Go Girl

Nicca Ray, author of the memoir, Ray on Ray: A Daughter's Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray, follows up her first poetry collection, Back Seat Baby, with more soul-baring verse in Go Go Go Girl. She collaborates once more with Jesse McCloskey who supplies a wealth of evocative drawings to complement each piece.

"Go Go Go Girl has the exhilaration, despair and feral beauty of a lost X album. Poems that open the heart's trap door. Images that burn themselves into your retinae." - Peter Trachtenberg, 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities

"Go Go Go Girl is an epic work by this symbiotic pairing. Ripping, tearing, gripping, daring. The rawest nerves, the dangerous curves. Life lived hard at all speeds - fast, slow, and everything in between. It's all in here, pulsing with Nicca's personal truth and illuminated by Jesse's ocular electricity." - Nels Cline, musician, Wilco

"The tightly chiseled poems of Nicca Ray burn with intensity in Go Go Go Girl. Reading these words, you feel the ferocity of a traumatic Los Angeles childhood, the back-alley punk adolescent strung-out affairs, the struggle to escape the lure of drink, drugs, sex, love and the past, and the joy of finding belief in the self...The poems are complemented by...intimate drawings...by Ray's partner, Jesse McCloskey, adding depth and expanse to the intricacies of the work..." - Kat Georges, poet, Awe and Other Words Like Wow; co-director, Three Rooms Press

"Nicca Ray and Jesse McCloskey enhance one another's work in this exquisite collaboration of poetry and artwork, reflecting lives intertwined in love and creation..." - Puma Perl, poet/writer, Birthdays Before and After

"Nicca Ray's new collection Go Go Go Girl is a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a haunting reminder of the thin line between salvation and surrender, love and despair. Complemented by Jesse McCloskey's superb monochromatic palette of drawings, every word becomes a melody, every line a revelation..." - Richard Modiano, Director Emeritus of Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center

"Go Go Go Girl is a portrait of Nicca Ray returning the gaze of a woman playing roulette with the addict riddled ghosts of her past. Undressing in front of a mirror gilded in punk, Ray questions what is self - as body, memory, spirit, shelter, nature, sex and street - while skillfully turning nightmares into dreams...this incredible collaboration features daunting images by visual artist Jesse McCloskey." - Kathleen Florence, writer + director

"Sprinkle some fairy dust where there's line and text...at the intersection of razors edge and dewy sundown field we find the curiosity that reflects on pain and turns ashes to gold...We are witness to the shadows and the juice of it all which Nicca and Jesse so naturally convey..." - Elizabeth Kresch, artist

"When I'm reading Nicca Ray's poems, they are frequently accompanied in my mind by the movie vignettes that her words inspire....a beboppery lineage stretching back to The Beats. Nicca's poems are real life, baby, there's romance in there for sure, but it's not that of the perfection fantasy. This is the stuff that regular folks know only too well...No ivory towers or silver spoons...The drawings by the artist Jesse McCloskey that illustrate this collection could not be more appropriate..." - Ray Gange, Rogue Gallery, England

"This is everything a collaboration should be. Whether scalpel sharp or as beautiful as wildflowers...Together they form a complete whole..." - Matthew Hupert, author of "ism is a retrovirus & secular pantheism", founder NeuroNautic institute/NeuroNautic press.