Beforelight (New Poets of America, 52) - Softcover

Gellman, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 196014510X ISBN 13: 9781960145109

Verlag: BOA Editions Ltd., 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity, ultimately committing to the self's authenticity as the highest form of devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative connections—familial, communal, and ancestral—as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to discover how not to “make a life out of pain.”

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Matthew Gellman is the author of Night Logic, selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press' Snowbound Chapbook Prize. The recipient of awards and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and Brooklyn Poets, he holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in Brooklyn.

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BEFORELIGHT

I am thinking of the sister I wish I had,
red hair spilling over the sedan’s back seat
as a boy speeds her through the blue vein
of suburb and out toward the cedar forest.
Her finger hooked in the hole burned into the seat
by someone’s boyfriend’s ash, her head
tilted back, lulled by the driver’s junky radio:
Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby, as long as you’re with me.
Even now, after years of trying to see her
striding into dusk, all beforelight, all promise,
her dress a galloping of small yellow wings,
my mind still delivers me only this:
that group of boys killing their engine
and doing to her under the cedars’ nimbus
things I will not say in this poem.
Not unlike the boy who held me underwater
in his swimming pool, July, his parents
not home, his whole body locked around me
as he pulled off my trunks, how even now
I can feel a small finger twisting my throat
when I try to tell it, if I were to tell it
completely, if I had a sister to tell.
When I find her along that highway
all her hair will be cut off. She will not speak
all summer and no kite will flutter
in her hands. But in winter, her hair
regrown, she will ask me to drive her

to that forest again, and clutching my arm
in hers, she will look out at the field
that broke her, not trying to say anything,
just rocking back and forth for a little while,
silent as the tundra glittering before us.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 196014510X
• ISBN 13: 9781960145109
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 101
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland