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Gay poet ponders life and love in new Shakespeare-inspired collection

‘Infinity Standing Up’ explores gay life, sex in witty verse styles of yore

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Drew Pisarra, gay news, Washington Blade
Drew Pisarra‘s poetry ranges from funny to sexy to droll. (Photo by Molly Gross)

‘Infinity Standing Up’
By Drew Pisarra
Capturing Fire Press
$10
58 pages
Available at Amazon and other retailers

Poets, you might think, are ethereal, humorless beings far removed from the joys and vexations of real life.  If you’re looking for something playful, sexy,  horny and brimming with heartbreak and betrayal, you likely would stay away from poetry. Especially, a book of sonnets.  

Yet, after reading even a few lines from “Infinity Standing Up,” a volume of Shakespearean sonnets by gay poet Drew Pisarra, your misgivings about poetry will be cast aside. Pisarra’s witty, elegant, yet poignant work adroitly punctures the myth that poets pompously pontificate on Mount Olympus.

Pisarra, who grew up in Silver Spring, Md., is no  Mount Olympian. He has his literary chops: he’s the author of “Untitled & Other Poems,” “Religion, Anatomy, Catastrophe” and other publications. His short story collection “Publick Spanking” was published by Future Tense. Yet his life has had some fascinating extra-poetic facets.

He toured the country with his mon4ologues “Queer Notions,” “Fickle” and “The Gospel According to Saint Genet.” At one point, Pisarra had a ventriloquist act called “Singularly Grotesque,” commissioned by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

Recently, with Molly Gross, Pisarra has been part of Saint Flashlight, an instillation art duo that works to get poetry into public spaces. One of the most inventive methods was movie marquee haiku. 

You can enjoy “Infinity Standing Up” without knowing anything about Pisarra’s bio, yet his work reflects the sophistication, wit, queerness and earthiness of his pursuits: from monologues about “Queer Notions” to hammering the letters of a haiku onto a movie marquee. Pisarra’s poetry is tethered to the things of this world — from love triangles to emoticons to sexting to traffic lights to sidewalk cracks.

Shakespeare wrote in his sonnets not only of the joys of love but its vicissitudes (betrayal, unrequited affection, rivals). Today, more than 400 years after Shakespeare’s time, there’s still nothing more delicious or capricious than love. “Infinity Standing Up” is the story of a man who has a passionate affair with his male lover. They break up, then get back together again and again. There’s jealousy, a rival, rage, despair as well as lust, joy and tenderness.  

As Mave Davis says in the foreword to “Infinity Standing Up,” Pisarra “joins a long line of lovers who have used the sonnet form to rebuild walls and repair roofs after a hurricane of love and loss.”

Yet, Pisarra makes the form his own. From the get go, he muses about and tweaks the conventions and meaning of love and sonnets. “What did it mean?/What did he mean?/Was he it?/Was it love?/Was love sex,” Pisarra writes in “Intro: In Bed With the Muse,” his introduction to his sonnets. “Why are sonnets always numbered?/What’s in a number?”

Pisarra’s sonnets are numbered in wonderfully zany ways. “What a cunning way to depict a sex/act! What a visual symbol for such sensual play!/Oh, what wise intellects/first saw in these digits the way to touch/on the frankly risque!” he writes in the marvelously raunchy Sonnet 69.

Sonnet $18.99 tells how the lover won’t allow the narrator of the poem to buy him a meal. “You wouldn’t even let me treat you to tacos,” Pisarra writes, “because you equated me buying you dinner/with dating and so we watched You Tube videos/before sex then chatted like two shy beginners/post bonk, our eyes cast downwards or staring out/into the dark, unseeing.”

“If music be the food of love, play on,” Shakespeare wrote in “Twelfth Night.”

If Shakespeare and Cole Porter had a love child it would be Pisarra. “I’d play a tune on xylophonic ribs,” Pisarra writes in Sonnet 8, “and make your diaphragm my trampoline/to spring me to that spot near grinding hips/where kidneys dance in pairs like jumping beans.”

Reading Pisarra’s sonnets is often like listening to heartbreaking, yet witty torch songs. “I wish your loving me/would’ve lasted longer, had been more than passing/fancy,” he writes in Sonnet 1, “that our romance hadn’t ended with me/getting dumped for that beauty from central casting.”

If you’re in the mood for a sexy, witty, torchy read, check out “Infinity Standing Up.”

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Books

Examining importance of queer places in history of arts and culture

‘Nothing Ever Just Disappears’ shines with grace and lyrical prose

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(Book cover image courtesy of Pegasus Books)

‘Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories’ 
By Diarmuid Hester
c.2024, Pegasus Books
$29.95/358 pages

Go to your spot.

Where that is comes to mind immediately: a palatial home with soaring windows, or a humble cabin in a glen, a ramshackle treehouse, a window seat, a coffeehouse table, or just a bed with a special blanket. It’s the place where your mind unspools and creativity surges, where you relax, process, and think. It’s the spot where, as in the new book “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” by Diarmuid Hester, you belong.

Clinging “to a spit of land on the south-east coast of England” is Prospect Cottage, where artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman lived until he died of AIDS in 1994. It’s a simple four-room place, but it was important to him. Not long ago, Hester visited Prospect Cottage to “examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture.”

So many “queer spaces” are disappearing. Still, we can talk about those that aren’t.

In his classic book, “Maurice,” writer E.M. Forster imagined the lives of two men who loved one another but could never be together, and their romantic meeting near a second-floor window. The novel, when finished, “proved too radical even for Forster himself.” He didn’t “allow” its publication until after he was dead.

“Patriarchal power,” says Hester, largely controlled who was able to occupy certain spots in London at the turn of the last century. Still, “queer suffragettes” there managed to leave their mark: women like Vera Holme, chauffeur to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst; writer Virginia Woolf; newspaperwoman Edith Craig, and others who “made enormous contributions to the cause.”

Josephine Baker grew up in poverty, learning to dance to keep warm, but she had Paris, the city that “made her into a star.” Artist and “transgender icon” Claude Cahun loved Jersey, the place where she worked to “show just how much gender is masquerade.” Writer James Baldwin felt most at home in a small town in France. B-filmmaker Jack Smith embraced New York – and vice versa. And on a personal journey, Hester mourns his friend, artist Kevin Killian, who lived and died in his beloved San Francisco.

Juxtaposing place and person, “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” features an interesting way of presenting the idea that both are intertwined deeper than it may seem at first glance. The point is made with grace and lyrical prose, in a storyteller’s manner that offers back story and history as author Diarmuid Hester bemoans the loss of “queer spaces.” This is really a lovely, meaningful book – though readers may argue the points made as they pass through the places included here. Landscapes change with history all the time; don’t modern “queer spaces” count?

That’s a fair question to ask, one that could bring these “hidden” histories full-circle: We often preserve important monuments from history. In memorializing the actions of the queer artists who’ve worked for the future, the places that inspired them are worth enshrining, too.

Reading this book may be the most relaxing, soothing thing you’ll do this month. Try “Nothing Ever Just Disappears” because it really hits the spot.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

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Books

Upcoming books offer something for every reader

From a history of the gay right to a look at queer women’s spaces

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(Book cover images courtesy of the publishers)

Daylight Savings Time has arrived, giving you more sunlight in the evening and more time to read. So why not look for these great books this spring?

If your taste runs to historical novels, you’re in luck. When Yorick spots his name on the list of the missing after the Titanic sinks, he believes this to be an omen: nobody’s looking for him, so maybe this is his opportunity to move to Paris and open that bookstore he’s been dreaming about. In The Titanic Survivors Book Clubby Timothy Schaffert (Doubleday, $29.00) his decision leads to more than a bucolic little business. Out April 2.

If you’re looking for something a little on the lighter side, discover Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball by Jason June (HarperTeen, $19.99). Young adult books are perfect light reading for adults, and this one is full of high-school drama, romance, comedy, and more drama. What fun! Out May 23.

Can’t get enough of graphic novels? Then look for Escape from St. Hell: A Graphic Novel by Lewis Hancox (Graphix, $14.99). It’s the continuing story of Lew, who just wants to live his life as a guy, which he started doing in the last novel (“Welcome to St. Hell”) but you know what they say about one door closing, one door opening. In this new installment, Lew grapples with the changes he’s made and how his friends and family see things, too. This book is fresh and honest and great for someone who’s just transitioned. Out May 7.

For the mystery lover, you can’t go wrong with Clean Kill: A Nicky Sullivan Mystery by Anne Laughlin (Bold Strokes, $18.95). As the manager of a sober living home in Chicago, Nicky Sullivan has her hands full with 10 other residents of the home. But when one of them is murdered, Sullivan reaches back into her past as an investigator to find the killer by calling on her old partner. Fortunately, he’s still working. Also fortunately, he’s got a new partner and she catches Sullivan’s eye. Can love and murder mix? Out May 14.

Can’t get enough of politics? Then you’ll be happy to find Coming out Republican: A History of the Gay Right by Neil J. Young (University of Chicago Press, $30). In the fractious political atmosphere we have now, it’s essential to understand how gay conservatives have influenced politics through the decades. Find this book before November. It may be one of the most eye-opening books you’ll read. Out April 3.

The reader who loves her “space” will want to take A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture by June Thomas (Seal Press, $30) there to read. It’s a book about historically safe places for queer women to be themselves – and some are surprisingly very public. Interviews with iconic feminists and lesbians round out a great look at the locales that queer women have claimed for their own. Out May 28.

And now the housekeeping: Release dates can change and titles can be altered at the last minute, so check with your favorite bookseller or librarian. They’ll also have more recommendations if you need them because there’s a lot of time for reading now.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

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Books

Gay author takes us on his journey to fatherhood in ‘Safe’

One man’s truth about the frustrations and rewards of fostering

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(Book cover image courtesy of Atria Books)

‘Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family’
By Mark Daley
c.2024, Atria Books
$28.99/304 pages

The closet is full of miniature hangers.

The mattress bumpers match the drapes and the rug beneath the tiny bed. There’s a rocker for late-night fusses, a tall giraffe in the corner, and wind-up elephants march in a circle over the crib. Now you just need someone to occupy that space and in the new book, “Safe” by Mark Daley, there’s more than one way to accomplish that dream.

Jason was a natural-born father.

Mark Daley knew that when they were dating, when he watched Jason with his nephew, with infants, and the look on Jason’s face when he had one in his arms. As a gay man, Daley never thought much having a family but he knew Jason did – and so, shortly after their wedding, they began exploring surrogacy and foster-to-adopt programs.

Daley knew how important it was to get the latter right: his mother had a less-than-optimal childhood, and she protected her own children fiercely for it. When Daley came out to her, and to his father, he was instantly supported and that’s what he wanted to give: support and loving comfort to a child in a hard situation.

Or children, as it happened. Just weeks after competing foster parenting classes and after telling the social worker they’d take siblings if there was a need, the prospective dads were offered two small brothers to foster.

It was love at first sight but euphoria was somewhat tempered by courts, laws, and rules. Their social worker warned several times that reunification of the boys with their parents was “Plan A,” but Daley couldn’t imagine it. The parents seemed unreliable; they rarely kept appointments, and they didn’t seem to want to learn better parenting skills. The mother all but ignored the baby, and the child noticed.

So did Daley, but the courts held all the power, and predicting an outcome was impossible.

“All we had was the present,” he said. “If I didn’t stay in it, I was going to lose everything I had.” So was there a Happily-Ever-After?

Ah, you won’t find an answer to that question here. You’ll need to read “Safe” and wear your heart outside your chest for an hour or so, to find out. Bring tissues.

Bring a sense of humor, too, because author and founder of One Iowa Mark Daley takes readers along on his journey to being someone’s daddy, and he does it with the sweetest open-minded open-heartedness. He’s also Mama Bear here, too, which is just what you want to see, although there can sometimes be a lot of tiresome drama and over-fretting in that.

And yet, this isn’t just a sweet, but angst-riddled, tale of family. If you’re looking to foster, here’s one man’s truth about the frustrations, the stratospheric-highs, and the deep lows. Will your foster experiences be similar? Maybe, but reading this book about it is its own reward.

“Safe” soars and it dives. It plays with your emotions and it wallows in anxiety. If you’re a parent, though, you’ll hang on to every word.

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