On Rigoberto Gonzalez's New Collection "Black Blossoms"

I believe the dead listen to us. After his poetic mentor, Ai, died, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote quite movingly about her: "Even in my third book (which I dedicate to her memory) I can still detect traces of her influence--we shared a love for the dark and disturbing narratives and gave them homes on the page."

Never mawkish in his elegiac statements regarding Ai, Gonzalez has always appeared respectful and honorable. No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems. With Black Blossoms, his new collection, Gonzalez has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers. I have no doubt she is still listening and learning from his work.

As an undergraduate, I was introduced to Ai in my first poetry workshop. I remember reading Cruelty and The Killing Floor and being shocked and relieved that someone could write about lower middle-class people with such determination.  Ai truly strove to have an empathetic imagination and risked the potential failure and  the predictable criticism that comes with it. I can still remember various Ai dramatic monologues: a boy who has just murdered his family; an aborted fetus; James Dean. Over the years, when I've returned to the poems of Ai, I've grown more ambivalent about her work. It's too easy to say that the poems are sensationalistic, exploitative. It is one of inevitable dangers of writing persona poems; it's a pretty boring knee-jerk liberal criticism--you're exploiting a certain class of people. However, truth be told, sometimes Ai did just that.

Gonzalez's poems, though, offer a generous and urgent corrective of her occasional limitations. Through his extraordinary use of figurative language, he reveals that a wholly self-conscious aesthetic can triumph over a flat, journalistic one. To defend Ai, I think that her desire to tone down the language was most likely the belief that understatement works best when dealing with sex and violence. By rarely, if ever, challenging this assumption in her work, her books become somewhat repetitive. Through what I see as honorably defying Ai, Gonzalez reveals the breadth and depth of what a personae poem can do.

One of Gonzalez's recurring trademarks is his obsession with similes.  Due to spiritual reasons, I've always been suspicious of them.  Why not accept the fact that everything in this universe is on some level uniquely its own?  To imply that something is "like" something else is to ungenerously take away from the thing's specialness.  But in Black Blossoms, Gonzalez's book, which consists largely of persona poems, the figurative language is used less to compare but to show a different side, a nuance, or a shocking oddity of and within the same thing.

In the poem "Flor de Muerto, Flor de Fuego," Gonzalez exhibits this masterfully.  Here's the opening.  Pay particular attention to the two similes embedded in the rhetorical questions:

        Cempoalxochitl.  Marigold.  Flower,
the scent of cold knuckles delights you, as does

         the  answer to death's riddles:
What's the girth of the hermit tongue once it retreats

         into the throat and settles like a teabag?
What complaints do feet make when they tire of pointing

        up and fold flat like a fan of poker cards?

Or take notice of the unexpected similes in the poem "Floricuatro":

Every birthday you eat a year off your mother's life--your mother plucked
in parts, petal by petal like the schizophrenic daisy, stares down as her heart

bubbles out vulnerable as yolk.

The list could go on indefinitely.  But I must add one last one which is the opening of "The Mortician's Daughter Dies Each Night":

"When my father laughs my stomach scatters in the wind like hay."

Teabags, a fan of poker cards, a schizophrenic daisy, yolk, and --yes!-- even hay.  What an odd and fascinating list of things juxtaposed in a single book of poems.  By inserting these sort of  images in a book that deals significantly with the grotesque, decaying bodies, political injustice, and violence, Gonzalez's relies on similes to create an intimacy with the reader (you might not understand mental illness, but you can imagine a daisy!).

At the same time, he pushes the reader away by forcing them to remember that all they're doing is reading a poem with strategically artful language.  The self-consciously slippery poetic language acknowledges that these personaes, these "scoundrels" (to use Ai's word) cannot be captured.  They haven't found a home in life or on Gonzalez's pages.  He's acknowledging them in a supremely graceful and ethical way.  Also, he gives the grotesque, the tragic some sort of relief.  Rather than affirm the horrible with a comparison to a grotesque object, he offers the reader a kind of momentary solace; he doesn't want to add insult to injury. 

Another prime example of how Gonzalez achieves this is through metaphor in the poem entitled  "Mise-En-Scene."  After the title, it appears "after Lizzie Borden."  Then the actual poem begins:

You are not a woman
         you are not a ghost,
or the shrill that makes the neighbor's hounds abort.

You are not a space between buildings,
         not wind tunnel or porthole
through which the indigent cat slips in and out of its coma.

You aren't the hermetic door with its back to the street,
         You are not the center.
You are not the interruption of the window

surprising the postman as he skips the tin mailbox once more.
          Every person in this house has died.
You buried your mother with a plum pit in her throat...

This poem is merciful.  Gonzalez allows the narrator of the poem acknowledges his own failure in his need to "capture" Lizzie Borden.  Gender is but only one of ways Gonzalez does this, creating a wonderful, peculiar jitteriness

You are not the dress
       that opens from the outside like an iron gate,
you're not the stupid woman
  
with her finger shoved inside her mouth.
       When she goes up in flames
she will melt into the fruit bowl.

You are not the fire, you are not the bowl.

There's what I like to call a discursive lyricism operating in Gonzalez's poems.  Although the poems are long-lined (at least much more so than in his last book, Fugitives and Other Strangers), Gonzalez interweaves just the right amount of figurative language with a necessary talkiness in the speech of these tragic personaes..  To limit, as Ai did, your characters' speech into "chopped" prose, isn't fair--they deserve the space, a large enough space, to explore their thoughts, motivations behind their unsavory actions.  Paradoxically, as the personae of Marisol in "The Mortician's Bride Says I'm Yours" says, "Sound is death because it's /irretrievable and every time I speak I die a little more."

If it wasn't sacrilegious to insist, I would say that through the splendor of Gonzalez's poems, he allows them to live once again in every delicate, precarious way they deserve.

Rigoberto Gonzalez's Black Blossoms is available for purchase at Four Way Books.

On Gay Male Despondency: A Square-off Between James Cihlar and Alex Dimitrov in The American Poetry Review

James Cihlar

Alex Dimitrov

In the September/October 2011 issue of The American Poetry Review, and only a few pages apart, there are two poems which deal with the issue of gay male despondency. With the frustrating, even if successful, queer movement, exhaustion and depression occur in both the private and public realms. Very rarely do gay poets make this emotional state the subject of their poems; its something that occupies the edges.  These days, it could be seen inaccurately as total resignation and not empowering. This is unfortunate for gay male poets who are in desperate need of new subject matter. Going to your first drag show, or seducing the football jock, can only go so far.

Alex Dimitrov's "Darling" and James Cihlar's "The Projectionist" approach the topic in different ways, and with varying degrees of success. The latter poem is the superior of the two; it not only has a more sophistical stance and curious tonalities, but it also avoids the sometimes overly-familiar feel of the former (a shame, since the poet in question there has produced much more interesting work).

Dimitrov's poem seems to use the subject of gay male despondency as a predictable pose rather a line of inquiry.  Pose and artifice are not necessarily bad things-- they can be invigorating-- but here it needs a boost.  "Darling," I'm tempted to tell this poem, "have a Red Bull."

More on that later, but first, the poem with what you could call the more "effervescent" despondency(!).  Deadpan is a pretty hard thing to do well. And perhaps, it's impossible to deal with the subject of despondency at all without some sort of use of this device. The title of Cihlar's poem "The Projectionist" is an obvious key on how to read the poem. The projectionist refers not only to the limitations of the escapism of movie-watching, but also a psychological coping mechanism. Here's the opening:

Is it pathetic to see the insides outside?
Matthew Arnold thought the sea was sad,
then he realized it was him.

I don't know how the world works,
how a friend becomes a stranger,
what a murder looks like on the face,

a hurricane. Brush lightly as you pass.
Sometimes an age just ends.

The poem is essentially a litany. What is exciting is the way it doesn't overwork the typical strategy of creating (what the writer thinks is) a sneakily revealed emotional crescendo resulting in a far-fetched epiphany. The poem just seems to "happen," much in the same way he declares life does. With grace, he constructs a strategically blithe inevitability:

...Celluloid culture
becomes cellular culture.
Anita Hill's college students

didn't know who she was.
We all get ahead on someone else's pain.
Once you start rewinding,

you have to go back to the beginning.

Unforced and unhurried, the poem's refusal to judge human nature, while at the same time, offering a comic disappointment toward what it entails, guides the poem to its charged closure:

We all get ahead on someone else's pain.
Once you start rewinding,

you have to go back to the beginning.
Everything we touch becomes infected.
I won't end like that. No rosebud,

no I don't give a damn, no lovers on the beach.
Dial it back to Paul Henreid in a white dinner jacket.
It's good to feel generous.

Does the "generosity" refer to the actual mission of his job in that he is in charge of offering these transcendent moments? Because he is the one who changes those reels, "dialing" the footage back night after night, he gives audience after audience the pleasure of projecting their desires upon these characters. They gain by the rote nature of his profession, making his job as something other than benign drudgery, but a useful, unappreciated "generosity."

To a certain degree, the poem's casual open-endedness allows for a mystery, something special created in what could be viewed as a despondency a gay writer sees in the world.

In the same issue of American Poetry Review, Alex Dimitrov's poem "Darling" is showcased. The title immediately announces that the poem will at least be in part about queer affectation. This could be a fun idea, if the poem lived up to that promise with inventive word choice and less middle-of-the-road syntax.  Dimitrov begins with a clear yet uninspired image of gay male despondency: "The days fall out of your pockets one after the other./Soon you'll need a new jacket with tougher leather/..."

The five (unrhymed except for the first) couplets that make up the poem continue in the same vein. We're given the stereotypical images of loneliness: "Soon you'll bring/the old books into your bed and sleep easy/and alone. It must be December again." Unfortunately, the laconic, deadening pose never reads as if its in tension with anything else--diction, imagery, larger philosophical inquiry, tangents, etc. This causes the poem to feel self-satisfied. It revels in its own despondency, but unfortunately yields only what feels like an unproductive self-romanticization. 

A little affectation is not necessarily a bad thing. Having lived in Western New York for seven years, I actually crave it--there's only so much rural earnestness I can take. However, the poem doesn't own it.  And if you're going to draw from the old and oft-used well of "winter" and "sleep" and the like, it would be good to drop that bucket down deeper, bring up something with a little more depth of cold and dream.

Here's the closure of his poem: "With heavy black boots/in a calm procession of darling and honey--they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart." (Does any gay man use the word "darling" anymore? It oddly dates the poem. You feel the poem was written by someone in the Violet Quill Club, not the Wilde Boys.)

It's a shame, too. Dimitrov has written some really good poems. I happen to like "Passage" which appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of Boston Review. He manages to reference both Hart Crane and Orpheus in a way that feels contemporary and sincere. It's difficult to do. I hope his book, Begging for It, which is coming out from Four Way Books, avoids the sort of phoniness in a poem like Darling.  Or else wildly polishes the idea of artifice and phoniness until it burns.  Dimitrov has the talent to do it-- let's see if he does.

On Michael Montlack's Debut "Cool Limbo"

You’ve got to applaud a gay man who dares to sport a retro cover on his first book of poems. He’s willing to give away his age. Once you acknowledge the past, in a campy way or not, you run the risk of fumbling towards a dim nostalgia. Michael Montlack’s first book of poems, Cool Limbo, avoids that fate, revealing a giddy sophistication. His book is laid-back and silly; its best moments, of which there are more than a few, is showboat-y... and with good reason.

The issue of age comes up more than once in Montlack's poems, disclosing a preoccupied self-awareness. Take the poem "A Golden Girls Prayer." It begins:

so that in old age I might...

ever coordinate my outfits
(complementing even those of roommates
and random houseguests passing through)


The best lines include specific allusions to the TV show. How can you resist this couplet? He writes: “so that[in old age] I might.../just once say, 'I'll be out on the lanai.'"

Not only does he inquire into old age, but Montlack also fiendishly investigates our childhood toys. He has a lot of fun in the poem "If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth":

Maybe she’d just meow.

Or maybe she’d still be mute after all.
Perhaps give us the silent treatment
out of sheer spite.

She could become a feline AIDS activist.

What’s great about a bunch of Montlack’s poems is that they are largely a series of unapologetic over-the-top comic riffs, jokes. He thankfully doesn’t balk at his own pettiness. Once in awhile he seems to lack the confidence in his conceits and turns to unnecessary pathos for closure. This “Hello Kitty” poem should accept itself as joke, exactly what the title promises. I wish he didn’t feel the need to humanize her situation. Why anthropomorphize at the end in order to give the poem a false gravitas? He writes:

And sure, she might secretly want them
to beg her not to leave.
But she’ll know she’s done right
when they so cheerfully say nothing,
nothing at all.

There’s a plethora of punchlines in the book that makes that minor flaw essentially disappear: “...the best beauty is mute” (“Peter Berlin”); “Will you/be the mosquito netting/draping my honeymoon bed...” (“The Slip”); “So take a course in Arts & Crafts,/buy a glue gun or sewing machine./The support staff has been promoted!/Your court gesture is now the Queen.” (“’Uh, didn’t you get the memo?’”); “My tough leather headbanger well hid the lace/only I glimpsed as she kept my straight face.” (“Running with the She-Wolf.”)

He also manages to enliven some tropes that I thought were long beyond resuscitating. I feared what was in store with a poem entitled “Bringing Straight Friends to a Gay Bar." Knowing all too well the familiarity of the convention, he doesn’t pause to creatively reveal that such an act “is like showing photos of the trip to Africa/you will never be rich or brave enough to take./Here are the gazelles, you could say, pointing/at the horny bar backs.”

Like any good comic, you can feel Montlack's impatience, his restlessness to move onto the next gag. What makes the collection impressive is his panic to keep us laughing is wholly unnecessary, yet makes him and us fully energized.

Michael Montlack's Cool Limbo is available through NYQ books.

On L. Lamar Wilson's Poem "Dreamboys"

One of the wonderful things in writing on this blog only about gay writers is that I can delude myself into thinking that the poetry world is containable, manageable. It’s similar to working on an anthology: if your topic or formal issue is narrow enough, you can exhaust a group of writers you want to include. Exclusion can have its benefits. Because there are only so many gay poets with books, it gives me time to surf the web and read literary magazines, searching for poets who are still emerging, who I believe will grow to become even more exciting presences on the poetry scene.

Almost all of the poets I review on the blog I have never met. I don’t even know what a gay poet looks like. L. Lamar Wilson, who as far as I can tell doesn’t have a book yet, is someone I know only through his poems. And as time goes by, I have no doubt he will have in his own way a career as substantial as Eduardo C. Corral and Matthew Hittinger, two emerging poets who have recently had their books accepted by significant presses.

One of the poems that first brought Wilson to my attention was his poem “Dreamboys.” This poem first appeared in the literary magazine Rattle I was truly impressed at the way that he rewrote Theodore Roethke’s "My Papa’s Waltz" with an energy as compressed as Yusef Komunyakaa or Heather McHugh. In the first three tercets of the poem, he manages to reference both the Roethke poem and the musical Dreamgirls, adding an explicit queer matrix to the former through the latter.

The setup, as I read it: the narrator’ brother was apparently once conflicted toward him as a result of his gayness. Now that his own son is displaying queer mannerisms, he’s forced to do “penance” and provide a protection that he never afforded his brother. To further complicate this family dynamic, in this "waltz", both brothers, straight and gay, come to the painful realization that they are both limited in the ways they can parent this young queer child. Here’s the opening:

My nephew waltzes beside his father,
The man who was the boy who made Faggot!
A reason not to flinch. His neck a merry-

Go-round, our boy rears back, waves
His pointer in my face, jabs his other fist
Into his fist & wails: Watch yo’ mouth!

Watch yo’ mouth, Miss Effie White!

So much has been written about the thematics of Roethke’s poem: is it purely a sentimental image of a somewhat drunken father and son dancing or is the celebration a disguise for abuse and alcoholism? If you should choose to read Wilson’s poem as an answer to that debate, the poem straddles a similar ambiguity.

Here, though the opposite side of the continuum is not violence, but the knowingness of one’s ineffectuality. The nephew’s showboating causes the narrator’s brother to be transported into the past. As Wilson writes: “In my brother’s eyes, I see/The pain of remembering when I crooned Don’t/Tell me not to live. Just sit & putter. Life’s candy/& the sun’s a ball of butter” (i.e., lines from the showtune "Don't Rain on My Parade" made famous by Streisand and, to a new generation, Glee's Lea Michele). At the same time, the narrator and his brother “applaud” yet at the same time “feign” laughter at the nephew’s queer antics.

The young gay child is also given more agency in this rewriting of the Roethke’s poem as as he sees “beyond the veil shrouding/His father’s eyes. Realizes this isn’t/How brown boys win favor.”

The young queer child is given the scruples to see through the romanticism and into the unfortunate realities of race and sexuality. What is especially rewarding in this poem is that the gay narrator admits his own helplessness in the matter—he’s as lost as helping his brother’s son as his brother was with him. The nephew “Searches/My eyes for answers.

In this time when nearly every gay male couple seems to be thinking about adoption, there’s an understandable refusal to address gay male frustration at our sometimes ineffectuality in being able to protect or reach a younger generation of gay men from the very hurts we once experienced. Through the bleak closure of this poem, Wilson begins to address it. You don’t need to go much further than the poetry spotlight on the Lambda Literary website to see other examples of such exciting complexities from L. Lamar Wilson that will build an undeniably great first book.

On Craig Moreau's "Chelsea Boy"

Craig Moreau’s new book of poetry Chelsea Boy feels as if it's nostalgic for someone else’s nostalgia. Moreau knows that he isn’t part of the heyday of wild sex and drugs which once embodied Chelsea. This distance doesn’t stop his overdetermination to see himself as a descendant of a missing subculture. It creates a weird disconnect in a book that wants to see itself as edgy and contemporary.

For a pretty much straight-up first person party boy memoir, the most surprising aspect about Chelsea Boy is that it is so sexless, almost virginal. This may be the most disappointing difference between the past and present iconic Chelsea Boy figure. With AIDS, Chelsea Boy has become frigid. In his prose introduction, Moreau writes that there were two guiding questions for him in his writing: “What is a Chelsea boy to you? And, do you consider yourself a Chelsea Boy?” Having read Chelsea Boy, my greatest fear is realized: it means a lot of preening, a lot of talk and not much action.

What’s the point of being beautiful if you’re not going to offer a piece of yourself to everyone who wants? Or conversely, what's the point of coveting a Chelsea Boy if he's not going to spit in your face? That’s the central problem with what Moreau admirably labels as autobiography: he’s a nice, resepectable guy. He’s pretty careful in his dealings with other men and not very mean. I always cringe when you ask someone what his worst flaw is, and he says, “I’m too giving.”

But Moreau is too generous. He doesn’t have enough fun with unabashed narcissism. Instead of giving us vain, indulgent narratives about sex and drugs –two impossible, thankless things to be writing about—he creates a series of poems entitled “Chelsea Boy Survival Guide” which contributes to the structure of the books. He's so sweet he makes the time to pose questions of etiquette. He lets the music rest.

Here’s a look from “Lesson #2: How to Build a Puzzle for a Broken Heart”:

Go to K-Mart and look
for however many pieces
will fix your broken heart.
(I recommend 1000+, ages 15
and up, preferably with a
Thomas Kincaid painting.)

Purchase a 40-ounce beer,
one with a name you don’t want
to remember, written in bold
lettering and sounds vaguely
Latin American.

This passage is emblematic of the writing in Chelsea Boy. At best, it's inoffensive and serviceable. The modest wit hides potentially intriguing subject matter, namely, a more explicit dialogue between the past and present Chelsea Boy figure in gay culture. It’s odd that the lore involving the Chelsea Boy needs to be transformed for Moreau into self-help. At points, Moreau feels as if he transforms into a queer Tony Robbins. This move toward self-help feels as dated as the origin of the Chelsea Boy figure itself.

His contrived literary allusions perhaps are a result of his anxiety about his subject matter. Rather than reenergizing the sex-and-drugs tropes, he feels compelled to give pedestrian tributes to literary giants. Here's a stanza from "O, Whitman":

I love you for being civil war peacemaker, above so many
boys at their last hour, not for your love of their sculpture
or even their spirit, but for their being—-leaves of grass
burnt by fire, and how I wish to lay aside you, both
as ash and apple.


When he does write about sex, as in the poem Rawhide 54, he uses obvious metaphor:

The water dish outside
is only for dogs--and thank gods
you're here. Where else
would I go to get a drink
when I'm not wanting to drink
cranberries, but still needing to take
my collar off and feel bitter
on my tongue...

In spite of its sincere intentions, Chelsea Boy ends up committing a fatal error: it gives sluts a bad name.

Craig Moreau's Chelsea Boy is available through Chelsea Stations Editions.

On Michael Klein's "then, we were still living"

In his new post-9/11 book of poems then, we were still living, Michael Klein creates the most involving mis-en-scene I’ve seen in a long time. Rich with various intellectual inquiries, the book could arguably be seen as a commentary on the potentialities and limitations of the mediums of film and poetry.

How does one ethically portray unmistakable tragedies and their aftermaths? In fact, you could claim that the poems’ deliberately blurry focus, their poetic abstractions, reject the rigidly staged domestic narrative with its concrete particulars.

It should be no surprise that I find Klein’s obsession with light as playing on the same field Stanley Kubrick did in Barry Lyndon. The film—my favorite Kubrick--is known for the director’s choice to use only natural lighting. In an early poem, "The playwright," dedicated to Mara Irene Forbes, Klein writes: “She was talking about the mystery happening to/the artist as necessary light.” Light as poetic process, as an unforced ars poetica. You might even call “Day and Paper,” dedicated to Jean Valentine, a complimentary theory of art. According to this poem, Klein's philosophy was engendered at an artist’s colony in Vermont. As Klein demands: “take that excruciating/collapse of light over day/over paper/and use it/when it feels most useless.”

The book’s closure ends with two poems, both revolving around light. In the final poem, Klein offers what a brilliant poem should: an opening for more. I don’t think too many poets have the courage to offer as much white space, a welcoming of light.

The poem “More light” features the protagonist (oh! How I want to say Michael Klein himself!) engaged in remodeling the kitchen. The banality of the act encourages the narrator to feel ephemeral joy in domesticity. With self-satisfaction, lesser writers would end the poem there—not Klein.

...indiscriminate joy finds us
and enters us

how it however briefly
releases our whole pasts
as a swimmer...

mild astonishment
around the eyes
ready to take the dark

as breath, as if to say
he'd seen the other world
less terrifying and with more light than this one.

The line break between “dark” and “as breath” conjures up several unexpected meanings. The narrator’s generous decision to extend the simile of the swimmer in such a way allows him to transform him into a heroic entity (“ready to take the dark”)—almost like a modest superhero. At the same time, the dark itself morphs into breath, refusing the dark/light dichotomy. This breakdown offers plenitude: breath, “the other world” as well as the maintenance of this one, and yes, even “more light.”

Light figures into a good number of poems in other ways, even unexpected ones. In the fun poem “Five Places for Sex,” which is written with a disproportionate number of end-stopped lines, making the poem look like a crude movie script, emphasizing the action—alas, even this formal strategy does not limit Klein’s gentle, perhaps understandably sentimental, philosophizing:

In the pornos, people don’t think about life

and death as it pertains to sex

They think that life is the empty room between cum shots--

cum shots—ticket shots—like streetlamps that come on

the same time every night.

Almost shocking, they are

if it weren’t for them lighting up the dark boulevard.

The strategically odd syntax and line breaks once again creates possibility: is the mundane—symbolized by the streetlights—sexualized (“that come on”)? If streetlights are alerted with regularity as much as a body against against another body, is Klein normalizing those come shots, and--hence-- porn? Is Klein using the streetlights as a comparison with the cum shots, or the empty room (a metaphor for life, the “empty room”)? Does it matter? Isn't it ultimately significant that sex is being spotlighted, taken out of the night, but not against it either.

The awkwardness of sex (and words) can render figurative language troubled at best, even if enjoyable, providing something like light. Like grace—something that Klein’s book offers in serious quantity.

Michael Klein's then, we were still living is available through GenPop books.

On Ed Madden's "Prodigal: Variations"

Poet Charles Jensen has always impressed me with the way in which his own work invests in different sorts of beauty. If you should read his work in magazines or his debut, First Risk, you can’t help but feel an aesthetic restlessness that serves him well: from narrative to lyric; domestic to meta-fictional; or even drawing upon Stein to destabilize the definitions of commonplace words.

It’s no surprise that we should be excited with what he will bring to Lethe Press as their new poetry editor. Lethe Press’ book designs are always stunning, their content always charged and necessary. I can't think of an author who wouldn't be happy with their product.

I love that Jensen chose, as a first book under his tenure, one that is completely different than his own style(s) and content. For me, this is always the true mark of a superior editor, and one Jensen should be commended for. I think he’s doing a great job already.

Jensen's first choice is Ed Madden’s Prodigal: Variations.

It is a very respectable, polished collection with more than reasonable aims: trusting incredible line breaks and wonderful sound to re-energize commonplace tropes of a gay man’s attachment to an abusive father, the rural life, and the Bible with, of course, a tortured ambivalence. It upsets me that it will receive much less attention than Michael Walsh’s weirdly anorexic The Dirt Riddles, which deals with many similar themes. Will Walsh's book stay more in the public eye than Madden's because it is distributed by a university press over a smaller, predominantly gay one?

You can feel the steadfast sincerity that Madden brings to his poems. It’s a hard thing to fake. At the same time, his words never fall into the pitfall of sounding merely earnest. Here’s a fairly emblematic selection of openings. From “Rock collection”:

His uncle taught him how to find them—
after light rain, best time to walk

the rows, find the flaked flint
in dark dirt, cream or pink stone,

a scrape or point in the wet furrow....



From “The secret gospel”:

The sound of rolling stone pushed back the darkness:
a grinding, as of grain and grit inside a mill.
The room filled with light; a man
stretched his hand toward another,
causing him to stand, the shroud unwinding.



From “Ghazal”:

I sing old hymns while you drive.
Neither of us believes them anymore.

What do you make from a piece
of driftwood found at dry lake?

The wind whistles through bare limbs,
a song of renunciations.


There’s nothing wrong with these lines. A lot of the poems in Prodigal appeared in great national magazines, as they should have. Madden is setting himself up to be a master stylist, which he succeeds in doing. He pushes the material as far as it can go in terms of craft. There's no denying the enviable style, a content of its own. Here is the end of “Rock collection”:

He left a cigar box of rocks in the closest—
arrowheads, fossils, an agate he’d found

in a mound of wet gravel, before
it was dozered into the dirt road,

glitter driven in the ruts, the ditches
lined that spring with bundles of pink phlox.

The passage is amazing--the fun of the word "dozered," for instance. Without any qualifications, Madden has an excellent ear for the combination of sounds and letters. I happen to own Ed Madden’s debut, Signals, and there seems to deliberately be nothing here, in terms of content, as tricky as “Roots: An Essay on Race” or fun set pieces like "The Mutter Museum." This smaller scope allows Madden to focus on sound, and this decision is a bold choice. It seems that with this book, he’s trying to master his rhetorical skills, struggling and succeeding with music, through material as rich as the soil he describes with careful, repetitive precision.

Meticulous yet never fastidious, Madden's second book of poems Prodigal: Variations takes the familiar trope of rural gay son-father relationship and turns it into something we can't live without. Madden writes: "The crow is a bruise/on the green hedge, it shines." That's how I felt about this book: painful, illuminating, necessary spectacle.



Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations is available through Lethe Press.