The leaves are changing colors and the leaves are everywhere. I work at a café in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, and by mid-morning the leaves have blown in and filled the entryway. I sweep them up into a dustpan. I resist the urge to return them outside to blow around again and go elsewhere. I place them in the trashcan.
Autumn is my season of looking backwards and forwards. The year is coming to an end and I feel reflective about what I have and haven’t accomplished during it so far. I consider how I’ve grown, or if I’ve grown, as a person and as a poet. My birthday is also in autumn, in November, which makes it a time to look forward to where I’m going. My book, Another Man, will also be published in the fall, which means my life as a poet is also due to change and grow as that book makes its way into the world. Another Man is full of memories – memories of childhood, of my father, of my family and my becoming the adult I am today. It looks to the past but also cherishes the opportunity to have a future. Where are we going, what will our lives look like, now that we’ve learned to grieve?
Still, as the days get shorter and there’s an increasing nip in the air, I yearn for the spring I didn’t fully celebrate, the summer I could’ve enjoyed more fully. I mull over the past, think about people I’ve loved or left behind. As I write this, I’m wearing an old pair of athletic shorts I stole from my ex-boyfriend. The elastic is a little worn out. I think of him when I put them on. All of this is to say, I hold on to things a little too much, too willingly. Perhaps that’s why I write poems, this sense of holding on. Here are a few of my favorite books – some queer, some not-so-queer – you might want to carry with you through this season of in-betweenness.
This Elegance by Derrick Austin
Read in concert, Derrick Austin’s three books of poems show us how a life filled with art, with friendships, with desire, can create such a strong sense of self, even while everything the eye sees is tinged with a sense of melancholy. In This Elegance, we see Austin’s speaker move from the isolation of COVID lockdowns into a global journey. Fueled by Austin’s travels through the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, This Elegance explores spaces public and private, the gallery and the bedroom, writing love letters to friends as well as to Black cultural icons. It’s a book that reminds me why we write poems – because we feel everything a little too much, and while the poem itself is not the balm that heals our feeling, the poem is the way we find the balm.
This one feels obvious, but if you haven’t read Crush, you’re frankly missing out. Crush shaped queer American poetry in a way no other book of the 21st-century can say. It’s like gayer Fight Club, if Tyler Durden wrote generation-defining gay love poems while listening to Nirvana’s Bleach and Radiohead’s OK Computer on repeat – the culmination of 90s angst and alienation and a kind of queerness long considered taboo. The speaker chronicles love and lust, loss and panic (as Louise Glück famously argues in the introduction). Says the poem “You Are Jeff,” “You’re in a car with a beautiful boy” – the most exhilarating, most dangerous thing.
Paradise, Indiana, by Bruce Snider
“Not enough people read Bruce Snider!” I yell, often it seems, into the void. I would yell this even if Snider were the nation’s best-selling poet. There’s no living poet who more clearly articulates the experience of queer folks in Southern and rural America. His poems are so important to me personally, and to the larger conversation of queer rural poetics. Paradise, Indiana shows us the queerness we know exists, albeit furtively, as we come to know and embrace it first within ourselves, a queerness we might only be able to explore in secret. The tension between identity of place and sexual identity pervades these poems. I’m reminded of Ethel Cain’s “Sun Bleached Flies:” “God loves you, but not enough to save you.” The saving, Snider’s speaker finds, is in the barn door’s rusty nail, in apple picking, in the ritual of a deer hunt, in the beloved’s body which mirrors his own.
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver
Another dispatch from the queer South is K. Iver’s debut collection, which chronicles and memorializes trans youth and spotlights the tragedy of trans suicide. I find myself drawn, again and again, to these books which chronicle the misalignments between place and identity. Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco is tender and indicting. It’s a book where every road is a dusty road, where the only hand that does not contain the potential for harm is that of the beloved. I find myself reciting Iver’s line, “Today, your bully is a place.”
How do we use the language that others would weaponize to do us harm? How do we reclaim it? The title of Joshua Garcia’s debut collection, Pentimento, is a term from art history referring to an instance when an artist has painted over their own work as an act of revision. Garcia’s poems revise and reclaim language – painting over, as it were, his own religious trauma to make a new image, a new life. The poem “I’ve Been Feeling a Lot Like an Edward Hopper Painting Lately” ends with the line, “My loneliness is not unique but it is the most precious thing to me” – true for many of us, for sure, but a sentiment only Garcia could express and make sound entirely sincere.
Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer
Some books teach me how to write, while others teach me how to see. Mannheimer’s debut book of poems, Earth Room, does the latter. A book concerned with the ekphrastic, but also with a life shaped by one’s own role as an audience, Earth Room considers the performative roles of the dancer, the sculptor, the museum caretaker, the office worker, and the lover, all in turn, how we watch each other and are, in turn, watched ourselves. We see this life’s triumphs and playfulness along with its heartbreak in the same slim volume, truly a masterclass in making the understated ring loud.
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe
I read with Marie Howe in a barn in upstate New York last summer. Having recently won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, she read last. It was too dark in the barn for her to read from her book so – flex of all flexes – she pulled out her phone, Googled herself, and read what came up. She read “The Gate” and “What the Living Do,” two poems that made me realize what a disservice I’d done myself for not having previously read her work. I returned to the city and bought two copies of New and Selected Poems at The Strand (one for me, one to give away). Look, especially, at the new poems and those drawn from What the Living Do, which centers on Howe’s loss of her younger brother, John, to AIDS in 1989. The speaker mourns, and through that mourning steps into a sense of self, one filled with faith and wonder at the world. What a career to read through, and what a triumph!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jim Whiteside is the author of the chapbook Writing Your Name on the Glass. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, he has published poems in the New York Times, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. He grew up in Cookeville, Tennessee.