GLR November-December 2024

ious medications: nausea, diar rhea, neuropathy, blindness. Many are committed to self care—talk therapy, self-help books, smudging sage—but the primary coping mechanism is gallows humor. (“Some of the best drug experiences I’ve ever had were in the hospital,” the narrator reflects in the story “Doppelgänger.”) Remnants of a Catholic upbringing inform some characters’ sense of faith. Contemplating a crucifix with a near-nude Jesus, the narrator of the story “Penance” wonders: “is the feeling miraculous or tragic or simply kitsch?” Men bond over shared interests (like gardening and archi tecture) and shared experiences (“our past loves and how they all died,” as detailed in the story “Need”). Survivors form rela tionships and nurse each other through health crises. In a time before gay marriage, they exchange rings to show their com mitment. Current and past partners—Marcus and Kevin and Eric and Craig—merge into a composite person who symbol izes deep caring. When the narrator dreams of stepping naked and dripping from a healing bath in the unfinished novel or novella “Heroes,” a shape-shifting lover is there to greet him: “The towel floats invisibly, held by open arms.” Several pieces address the experience of being multiracial. The parents in the story “Dis(coloration)” purposefully don’t teach their children Spanish to force them “to be as American as possible.” In the story “Hands,” the narrator, unable to com municate with a mother in her native tongue, fears disappoint ing her by being “like an Oreo, brown on the outside, white on the inside.” This heightened sense of otherness gives Cuadros’ narrators a unique vantage point from which to notice things about themselves, their partners, what people are like when they don’t know they’re being observed, and how they change when they realize they are. In “Heroes,” the narrator immediately re grets making his older lover Marcus feel self-conscious about the way he moves his hands while listening to disco music on his headphones, “as if I popped a delicate multicolored soap bubble floating in solitude across a park on a gentle wind.” The good and loyal Marcus pops up in several places. We first see him striding through his nursery “in total command, like a god in his Eden” (“Hands”), then sitting on the floor draw ing his lover in “Heroes,” his bent leg revealing a worrisome lesion. In the poem “Wedding Bands and Bone,” his skeletal hand falls through the hospital bed’s railing, and his ring slips to the floor. His lover, sitting bedside, is preoccupied with the ring when “A sudden breeze comes through the windows/ Sweeps my attention away, pulls him like leaves in a whirlwind/ till they are gone and all that’s left is stillness.” This is all so heartbreaking, but there’s no self-pity here. And because the writing is so direct, unadorned, and attuned to what’s happen ing in the moment, Marcus lives on—in these pages and after ward, in our minds. The prose sometimes contains unexpected line breaks that suggest a sense of possibility, as if the experience Cuadros is writing about could have been rendered as a poem. Because My

Body Is Paper contains undated work, it’s less about his evolu tion as a writer than about our experience of his deeply felt con cerns: the pleasures and horrors of the body, the link between spirit and nature, the sense of meaning we can derive from care fully tended relationships. “We weren’t put down here for that,” the speaker’s mother insists in the poem “If She Could,” sham ing her son for being gay, as if it were only about sex. While there is a lot of explicit sexual content in this collection, Cuadros’ trailblazing work shows us that being gay is so much more than that. _______________________________________________________ Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brook lyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue.

Never Made Sense of It

B RUCE S PANG

SELF PORTRAIT OF ICARUS AS A COUNTRY ON FIRE by Jason Schneiderman Red Hen Press. 80 pages, $17.95 A Schneiderman has done the latter brilliantly in his new book, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire . He reflects humorously on his life as a poet, often poking fun at himself and his poses. He wrestles with his Jewish heritage by taking on Stalin and the Holo caust, and then delves into the angst of gay divorce. His long lines and breezy casualness make you feel you’re in a café where, after a few drinks, the poet has unlatched the cages in his imagination, freeing the wild creatures that reside there. In the poem “Catastrophist,” he starts by speaking to the reader: “Your heart doesn’t have to break every day.” You feel as if he’s leaned over the table to explain what he means. “Most of life, if you are lucky, is pretty boring,/ filled with unburned houses,/ un crashed cars,/ unsick friends, unfled countries,/ and unshot schools.” He goes on to imagine a tribe that most values those who can create fear and caution. But, with a quick shift, he admits that his dreaded fears rarely happen and that he’s stuck with the fact that “It’s not easy to live just one life, and yet/ we are called upon to do just that.” You feel as if he’s led you into seeing the world from four or five different directions and managed to bring you back to something substantial, worth remembering. In his Stalin poems, he draws our attention to our own demagogues and to how they operate: “Do you know what’s persuasive?/ Repetition./ You just have to say it over and over/ and people will be pretty sure/ it must be true.” What’s refreshing is that his poems do as Robert Frost said they should do: start with delight and end with wisdom. His insights are so refreshing that you want to laugh and, equally, to grimace, because they’re so graphically on tar get. He’s willing to take on the white supremacist coopting of the Nazi racist term “Blood and Soil” and express his fierce S A POET AGES, he’s often faced with several choices. He can keep doing what he has always done, or he can, by seriously confronting himself, seek another voice. Jason

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