John Philip Drury

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John Philip Drury is the author of Sea Level Rising (Able Muse Press, 2015) and three earlier books of poetry: The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, andThe Refugee Camp. The first part of “The Ruined Aristocrat” reconstructs a conversation broadcast in the 1980s on Sally Jessy Raphael’s radio show, when his mother phoned John Waters from the garden apartment she shared with her lover and secret wife, Carolyn Long, a former opera singer. The ballad in Part Two draws on seventeenth-century accounts by William Strachey and Captain John Smith, as well as The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America by Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith.