GLR July-August 2024

Are Drowning ; the word- and sound-play in “Littler Sonnet” ( Wrong ); “Self-Portrait in the New World Order” (from the post 9/11 Fata Morgana ); and especially “The Gods at 3 AM” ( Angel, Interrupted ), with its perfect evocation of being un partnered in a gay bar, where everyone but you is beautiful and desired:

its clothes. That clarity is made all the more complex and fraught with the fact that he is also always clear about his desire for white men.” It was that complexity combined with his cu riosity about and questioning of himself and the world at large, without any clear resolution, that added to the difficulty of his poems for some readers. Like Jericho Brown, I also looked forward to each collec tion, wanting “to know how his poems would refute and expand the practices of his previous work.” In the year of his demise, Shepherd wrote in his blog the following about his poetry and his reason for writing it (April 4, 2008): My poetry operates within a literary tradition and a literary lan guage to which I owe my formation as a writer, yet which is not “mine” (as a black gay man raised in Bronx housing proj ects): I wrestle with this necessary angel and rise renamed, blessed but also lamed. ... It’s my intention to inscribe my pres ence into that language and that tradition, not to “subvert” it but to produce a place of possibility within it. I wish to make Sappho and the South Bronx, the myth of Hyacinth and the homeless black men ubiquitous in the cities of the decaying American empire, AIDS and all the beautiful, dead cultures, speak to and acknowledge one another, in order to discover what, if anything, can be made of a diminished thing (in Robert Frost’s phrase).

The gods don’t say hello, and when you ask them How they are the gods say they don’t know, the gods Are drunk and don’t feel like talking now, but you Can touch their muscled backs when they pass.

“Don’t try/ to say you didn’t know the gods are always white, the statues/ told you that,” Shepherd writes later in “Gods.” His wrestling with mixed feelings about white men sometimes upset and divided his readers—particularly Black readers—over the poet himself and his work. For example, publishing a multi-lay ered Jeffery Dahmer poem (“Hygiene ” ) that doesn’t explicitly condemn its subject and even implicates the poet himself— “Every white man on my bus home looks/ like him, what I’d want to be destroyed/ by, what I want to be”—did not help Shepherd’s case with these critics. Notes Brown in his introduction: “Shepherd was always clear about the troubles made by whiteness and about the fact that whiteness always arrives wearing empire and capitalism as

B R I E F S watches from a strip/ of artificial grass” (“Mid-Century Modern”). In “Outdoor Shower,” the speaker, pressing up against his husband’s backside, imagines the way their bodies might appear through the glass brick wall, “unseen but also seen ... a nude blur.”

COACHELLA ELEGY Chris ti anGulle tt e Trio House Press, 80 pages, $18 A feeling of imminent doom pulses through Christian Gullette’s refined poetry debut, Coachella Elegy . In climate-ravaged California, people burn through resources, party like it’s the end of the world, and “everyone’s song of summer/ is about ad diction and love” (in “Desert Ride”). The collection is structured in four sections of verse about travel to four destinations, with three prose interludes that reflect on the journey. Stops include a sun-scorched Palm Springs and an ultra-gentrified San Francisco, where an AIDS-haunted Castro funeral home is “now shuttered and slated for condos” (“City Bees”). At the collection’s heart are the speaker’s relationships with two men, each strained by illness and tragedy: an emo tionally disturbed brother who flips his jeep in a fatal highway accident, and a hus band who emerges on the other side of a cancer diagnosis with a prosthetic eyeball. Several poems are set in Airbnbs, 21st-cen tury Edens where good-looking men party poolside, palm trees reflected in their mir rored sunglasses, while wind turbines slowly spin in the distance. When a “guy fidgets with the knot/ in my swimsuit,” the speaker observes how “My husband

eventually to a full-blown movement. Author Damon Scott puts the postwar city of San Francisco under a microscope, focusing on how government policies and actions impacted the city’s waterfront. Bars and other relatively low-rent estab lishments in that area during the repressive 1950s became gay hangouts. As white, hetero-normal families moved to the sub urbs, city officials grew concerned about who was left—racial and ethnic minori ties, to be sure, but also an excessively “single” population. Like officials all across the nation, the city went after the gay population by cracking down on “vice.” At first they did so by trying to contain the gay population within one small, run-down area, and then they liter ally destroyed its main venues through urban development. In place of bars and hangouts with names like the Ensign Café, the city built freeway ramps and envi sioned upscale offices and apartments. But by cracking down on spaces where queers could gather, the city unintention ally helped foster a political reaction— early stirrings of political consciousness before Stonewall. As Scott argues, changes in the built environment fostered a change in the understanding of sexual difference. The city thus got the opposite of what it tried to accomplish. By destroy

Like modernist sculpture or mid-century furniture, the poems are stripped down to their barest lines. Powerful, deep-seated feelings—fear for his husband’s health, sadness about his brother’s shattered life, anguish over politics and climate change— surface like tremors that crack the stone faced façade of coolly observed emotions. Taken together, the poems work like a pointillist painting in which each carefully placed dot of color contributes to an unset tling picture of grief, desire, and sorrow for a ruined world. M ICHAEL Q UINN THE CITY AROUSED Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco by Damon Sco tt University of Texas Press. 336 pages, $45. A testament to the law of unintended con sequences, The City Aroused tells the story of how a crackdown on gay life by the city of San Francisco in the 1950s led to the first stirrings of gay rights activism and

TheG & LR

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