TEN BRIDGES I’VE BURNT A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell MCD. 128 pages, $17. The 38 ballsy, autobiographical poems in Brontez Purnell’s Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt pick apart different aspects of his identity (gay, Black, American, fat, promiscuous, among others) to explore the ways they’ve made him feel both visible and misunderstood (including by himself). Born to an exhausted mother and a resentful father in Triana, Alabama, Purnell came into his own in Oakland, California. Now at midlife, he reflects on the way these people and places have shaped him (or failed to do so). Code-switching offers a passport between worlds. He navigates the P.C.–strained viciousness of the poetry community and exploits his own trauma as a television writer. He butches it up at the barbershop and dons different kinds of sneakers to attract white or Black men. In “Alumni Sweater,” the title object is a status symbol in one locale (northern California) but marks him as a “pussy nigga” in another (New York City). The poems have the dashed-off quality of text messages and social media posts, marked by a lack of punctuation, unconventional spelling (“Black Grrrls”), and seemingly random capitalization used for emphasis (American audiences “are the WOOOOOOOORST,” he asserts in “On Writing”). In “RAGE OF EVERY COLOR,” he rails against being defined by “the ten bridges I’ve burnt/ but not the hundred that I’ve built.” The poems’ surface informality and wryness belie Purnell’s deep and lifelong preoccupation with issues of race and class, and the importance of gay men mentoring one another. In “I Am Decided,” the twentyyear-old poet whines to his gay uncle about boys not liking him. Without looking up, his uncle gestures to the street outside: “You’ll see that in San Francisco, even the trash/ gets picked up once a week.” That’s cold. MICHAELQUINN DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA ANovel by Venita Blackburn MCD. 240 pages, $27. In the Clinic for Accidentally Killing the Person You Only Meant to Seduce, a choir of unnamed voices will teach you about time as it exists on the internet: time as a bookmark, as something to return to, as a message that you can choose to respond to or leave unread. In Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, CA, there are as many clinics as there are relations to time. “We B R I E F S created clinics to practice all the ways people stopped living their lives in order for us to understand them better,” the collective voice reminds us. Blackburn is the author of short story collections: How to Wrestle A Girl and Black Jesus and Other Superheroes,winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her latest work, while a novel rather than a short story collection, takes a fragmented approach to storytelling, using the hybrid form of her previous books, including text messages interspersed with newspaper clippings, third-person narration, and a novelwithin-a-novel. The intention is to ask questions about agency and identity in these technological times, questions like: Can you ever really die on the internet? And: What happens when you start responding to your dead brother’s text messages as your brother? That is the catalyst for Blackburn’s novel, which explores the relationship between queerness, Blackness, and grief through the eyes of Carol, the grief-struck woman who, after discovering her brother Jay’s body the morning after his suicide, decides to respond to his texts—as Jay. Carol flirts with the women her brother was talking to; she confronts her past with Naima, Jay’s ex and the mother of Khadija, Jay’s daughter. On the internet, she’s an author, fanfic inspiration, serial dater, brother, sister, and aunt. The novel raises existential questions about identity in the 21st century that traverse, and even eroticize, death and the grieving process. As the clinic(s) remind us: we are removed from our bodies only to discover them physically inescapable. ALLISONARMIJO MATERIAL WEALTH Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg Compiled and Annotated by Pat Thomas powerHouse Books. 256 pages, $58. Pat Thomas, Beat and Counterculture historian, has compiled a treasure trove of Ginsberg archival materials in a mind-blowing kitchen sink of a volume that’s filled with the contents of Ginsberg’s mania for saving everything from ticket stubs to photos to the twig remains of hallucinogenic substances. Thomas has sifted through Ginsberg’s papers at Stanford University to produce a massive coffee table book that includes ephemera, letters, works-in-progress, diary entries, and political tracts that document his life journey from Beat poet to Yippie to Tibetan Buddhist to countercultural icon to gay activist and explorer of alternate realities and states of consciousness. Thomas insists that this volume is not a biography of Ginsberg but rather designed to illuminate aspects of Ginsberg’s life as well as offer a window into the lives of his friends, lovers, colleagues and fellow travelers. The collection provides the reader with much to enjoy and ponder. There’s a very funny parody by Terry Southern, Towel, that riffs on Ginsberg’s famous poemHowl.We also encounter Ginsberg on the cover of the January-February 1973 issue of the magazine Gay Sunshine. This is a must read for those who are interested in Ginsberg, the Beats, and the Counterculture. A brief afterthought about Ginsberg and his collection: I find it paradoxical that Ginsberg, an avowed Tibetan Buddhist, amassed such a trove of material wealth while simultaneously adhering to a philosophy of non-attachment. Perhaps this flipside to his ascetic persona is meant to be a Buddhist parable in and of itself, who can say? IRENE JAVORS BOUND: Poems by Jubi Arriola Headley Persea. 80 pages, $18. As with his first collection, Jubi ArriolaHeadley’s second book of poetry, Bound, has the tenderness and toughness that give it both heft and heart as he explores themes of family, fathers, God, displacement, and his Caribbean roots. In “N’Jadaka’s Appeal,” he writes: “Why do men metaphor/ mothers into countries, into tongues?/ I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had/ a country. I mean, a mother./ I mean, a home. I mean, a tongue.” There are poems of boldness, such as “RESOLVED: I will no longer apologize,” which includes the lines: “For the way I run my tongue along the underside of a foreskin/ ... For not believing in God. For God.” And the collection is infused with the heroes of a gay Black sensibility, displaying its unique perspectives and sense of irony in poems such as “Look” and “Breath.” Arriola-Headley also experiments with multiple poetic structures, from staggered stanzas and prose poems, poems in shapes or left-justified, to variations in line breaks and white space. There are even several centos (“a poetic form of collage composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets”) comprised of quotations from queer luminaries such as Michelle Tea, Langston Hughes, Rimbaud, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan. But it’s the personal poems that I loved best, their vividly rendered characters reaching right into the heart, such as the wild child in “Eddie or Ecstasy”: “And it’s important here/ to be fair to Eddie, to remember/ he doesn’t ask like he’s a porn star 44 TheG&LR
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