Island author’s poetic memoir now available

Bainbridge Island writer Beverley Lehman West’s latest offering, “Let’s Always Miss Our Flight,” a memoir in poetry, is now available at Eagle Harbor Book Company.

Coming on the heels of her popular memoir “Finding My Way Back to 1950s Paris,” a book that explored first and second love, youth and adventure, careers, motherhood, divorce and then, in her 70s and 80s, a rediscovery of Paris, the city of her dreams — West’s new book “goes deeper into the characters and places that drove her to become the 92-year-old inspiration she is today.”

In 69 prose poems, West time-travels through her youth, treating the reader to some of her most popular and risqué poems, set in San Francisco, Paris and New York.

A 13-year-old girl in World War II-era California, trying to make sense of the Japanese Internment as it happened around her.

A young woman on her first ocean voyage learning the benefits of the French bidet.

A budding journalist in New York sharing the elevator with the weird, wonderful writers from MAD Magazine.

The ins-and-outs of marrying a New York bar-brawling, would-be writer — and bringing him to San Francisco to raise their two sons.

And then, in her 80s, finding new love and realizing that “her adventurous spirit, her joie de vivre, is as much a part of her at every stage of her life as it was when she first discovered it in her teens.”

The author will be at the downtown Winslow eatery Good Egg from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 10 to mark the book’s debut.

“My sons, Peter and Mark West, will also read with me,” she said. Light bites, beer and wine will be available.

West will also visit Eagle Harbor Book Company and perform a reading at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 12 with Carol Despeaux Fawcett, who will read from her poetry book, “The Dragon & the Dragonfly.”