In Three Hundred Streets of Venice California, the beachside neighborhood shape-shifts from landscape to dreamscape to self portrait. Among these prose poems are wry fables: gnarled parkway trees plotting against the Bureau of Street Services; a derelict commercial property that has witnessed all Five Ages of Man; a peacock strutting for months, unhurried and unharmed, across rush-hour boulevards.

Here, too, are anxiety and sorrow: streets that forget their violence and neighbors who wonder whether, above the city’s illuminated midnight sky, there really are stars. Throughout, Laichas’s imagery is precise, haunting, and indelible.

Athens, Georgia: FutureCycle Press, 2023.

ISBN 978-1-952593-44-4.

Coming in January 2023 from Amazon or Bookshop. Or pre-order the Kindle edition for just $3.

Advance Praise

In this extraordinary collection, Tom Laichas is our Virgil, guiding us through Venice, California, and its ancient namesake. Throughout, Laichas shape-shifts from resident, to historian, to social critic, to ghost, moving among one neighborhood’s heavens and hells. A work of poetry, prose, and memoir, Three Hundred Streets is masterful, powerful, provocative, and unforgettable.”

—Susan Suntree, author of Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California

L.A. cartography, dreamscape, and family history coalesce as nuanced prose poetry in Tom Laichas’s Three Hundred Streets of Venice California. Fans of D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land will savor these vignettes. These poems pull you in, mapping “a cloud of remembers…a lost-in-thought heaviness.” Laichas remembers it all, and “the names from that other story…lean in and listen.”

—Mike Sonksen, author of Letters to My City

To belong to a body, you have to remember where that body’s been. You have to follow a street all the way to its end.” Tom Laichas writes with the assurance and authority of one who has walked that walk. Poem by poem, he gives us Venice Beach in all its contradictions: its beauty, its grit, its foggy June gloom. Hang out with this book and start walking.

—Beth Ruscio, author of Brick Road Poetry Prize-winning Speaking Parts