The devotional, unrelenting, deviant Crush is a linguistic feast:
the word is everything in Stockton's and Gilson's world, except
when it isn't, except when it's time we shoved // our jeans down
and stepped / into the world. This is a sensual - perhaps a better
word is bodily - collection, the scent of shit and frowsy hats and
bleach and the boy who always smelled / like cat litter adding some
much-needed filth to poetic longing - for what is longing, frankly,
without the cleanup after? There are texts and subtexts and
Facebook-stalks; there are at times startlingly tender moments, as
in the poems about a brother's suicide and an uncle's AIDS-related
decline. I'm thinking of what any of us / can tolerate, the poets
write in Fall, Then Falling. I feel as if I need a shower after
reading Crush; I can think of no higher praise. Randall Mann,
author of Breakfast With Thom Gunn and Straight Razor The louche
candor of Crush, like Calamus before it, makes a ravishing case for
poetry as queer theory. Smitingly smart, smartingly sexy, frank as
nerve endings, and swoony as the first warm nights of Spring: these
poems are as vividly compelling an account of erotic multiplicity
as any I know. Michael Snediker, author of The Apartment of Tragic
Appliances In Crush, a stunning collection of erotic poems and
queer meditations delineating Stockton' and Gilson's mutual
crushing on each other, but also all of the ways in which, sweetly
and also sadly, affection ameliorates the anguishes that, despite
our deepest devotions, are never constant, Stockton and Gilson
write, In Aranye Fradenburg's words, Shakespeare's sonnets describe
the love you feel for inappropriate objects: for someone thirty
years older, thirty years younger. The kind of love that makes a
fool, a pervert, a stalker out of you. Let's start here, for much
of this description applies to Petrarchan conventions as well.
Let's start here, with this affective entrance into the poems and
the impossibility of dispossessing the other's voice in the
manufacture of one's own machine. Let's start here, with a vision
of poems as indexes of crushes rendered inappropriate, unhealthy by
some gradation of difference and level of intensity. With the
question of what distinguishes a crush from love if both turn you
into a different self. Under oak trees and sunlight, in coffee
shops and locker rooms, steam rooms and seminar rooms, and in
conversation with Milton, Shakespeare, Frank O'Hara, Narcissus,
Allen Ginsberg, Jacques Derrida, Aranye Fradenburg, Mary Magdalene,
Freud, Oscar Wilde, Jose Esteban Munoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Elton John, and Prince, among other poets, harlots, saints, and
scholars, Stockton and Gilson explore the ways in which friendship,
desire, falling, swerving, possession, holding, faggoting, falling,
longing, poeming, and crushing open the self to queerly utopic, if
also difficult, deflections - other, more improbable modes of
being, as Foucault might have said.
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