Pet Food & Tropical Apparitions includes poems, stories, and a novella. The final section of the collection consists of previously unpublished prose and poetry.In this book, Hagedorn's voice becomes fierce and hard. In the novella “Pet Food,” the teenage Filipino narrator—George Sand—is writing a musical about her life on the streets of San Francisco and tells of sex, drugs, murder as part of daily existence. This work is representative of DANGER AND BEAUTY, an amalgam of Filipino roots and urban American experiences that never fully blends. In “Carnal,” one of the more recent pieces, Hagedorn returns to San Francisco and says, “I’m home, in spite of myself.” It has been a long journey, and some readers may have a similar experience with this collection. Others, though, may find that the underlying beat of such personal and artistic exploration resonates with them in powerful ways.
