KIRBY POETRY IS QUEER
Kirby’s Poetry Is Queer is a work that refuses to be contained, boxed-in, defined by any terms that might seek to diminish or limit its insistence on possibility. A manifesto for life as art, art as life, one that witnesses, repairs, and defends the self in all its time-spanning facets — beauty, liberation, grief, survival, transcendence — Poetry is Queer is a gift from a rebel elder who is willing to look back with honesty and to reach forward with hope.
DAMIAN ROGERS, Author of An Alphabet for Joanna
In Kirby’s devastating and erotic redress of queerness, the beloved poet maps their homosexual body/world set around poems by queer contemporaries across decades. What emerges is Poetry Is Queer, beautiful, sexual, and flamboyantly, unapologetically gay. “Thank you Saturday Night Cock God!” This is the best kind of museum.
JOSHUA ESCOBAR, author of Bareback Nightfall
"Kirby’s Poetry is Queer. There’s a wisdom in it that is rare and so, so vibrant (courage)." - NEIL SURKAN, poetry mini interviews, author of Unbecoming, and Their Queer Tenderness
Has Cavafy’s ghost entered my body?
If so, it did at a very early age. I’ve often wondered what was meant by ‘old souls,’ but regarding mine, I have no doubt.
That and/or, gay teenage longing is very similar to that of an elder’s. Everything but want slightly out of reach.
KIRBY
POETRY IS QUEER
(Palimpsest Press)
Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers, real and imagined, conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word QUEER for those “who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state,” Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O’Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman’s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other. (Palimpsest)
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