TOBY MARTINEZ DE RIVAS TERROR
Rivas is a total scholar of the apocalypse whose erudition’s mode is its own self-immolation. There’s a clenching drama between the precision of the language and the malady of death that pressurizes it into that precision.
LYNN CROSBIE THE CORPSES OF THE FUTURE
She turns the banality of sickness and frustration into a poetics of honesty. I look to Lynn when I need another mind as sensitive to mourning as a plain fact of life but so much tougher & rawer than my own.
JAMES MERRILL THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER
He wrote this with his lover, with a Ouija board. The tongues of the dead summoned mix with a sly liveliness of Merill language, and the whole thing breaks into wraithy wisteria right there in your spirit.
JOE BRAINARD I REMEMBER
Like the essence of New York found its prophet in the voice of this beautiful man with his gargantuan hands. This long poem makes me bend in easy lust, makes me run delight rivulets into the democracy of his memory’s capacity.
BERNADETTE MAYER MIDWINTER DAY*
Reading this reminded me of the stunning, ceaseless, and wise continuity of that thing we too quickly call Life. Bernadette teaches us the universal connectedness of being because she is immune to exclusion.
JACK SPICER AFTER LORCA
O Jack, who taught me the curmudgeonliness of being Queer. His voice shrouds a palpitating tenderness to the world with a Scorpionic cloak of suspicion, so how heartbreaking when that cloak drops when he addresses his master, his lover, Lorca.
FAN WU is Poetry Editor and Curator for the reading series What Queer Reading (wQr), an imprint of knife | fork | book
* On the fortieth anniversary of Midwinter Day, Mayer’s famous long poem written over the span of a day, HOA NGUYEN leads a 3-hour poetry workshop at knife | fork | book SATURDAY DECEMBER 22, 2018 2-5PM VERY LIMITED REGISTER TODAY
This post first appeared at whatqueerreading.com
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