front cover of Fantasia for the Man in Blue
Fantasia for the Man in Blue
Tommye Blount
Four Way Books, 2020
In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular “man in blue”—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.
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front cover of Forest with Castanets
Forest with Castanets
Diane Mehta
Four Way Books, 2019
In her debut book of poems, knit together with personal essays, Mehta explores her own cultural history— Indian Jainism and American Judaism—as well as her ideas about faith, feminism, and family.
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front cover of Forgive the Body This Failure
Forgive the Body This Failure
Blas Falconer
Four Way Books, 2018
Engaging the past and present, these poems attempt to reconcile loss and longing while also seeking to understand our own impermanence. Written in a plain-spoken voice, they are meditative, elegiac and tender.
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front cover of The Foundling Wheel
The Foundling Wheel
Blas Falconer
Four Way Books, 2012
Centered on the adoption of a gay couple’s first child, The Foundling Wheel employs apt imagery to create an emotional mosaic that explores the complicated bond between father and son. Beginning in a place where the desire to have a child has not yet been realized, this book is a journey, and while the poems certainly rejoice in fatherhood, they also grapple with the fears that accompany it.
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front cover of Furs Not Mine
Furs Not Mine
Andrea Cohen
Four Way Books, 2015
The poems in Furs Not Mine display Andrea Cohen’s masterful craft and lyricism and her keen wit. In Cohen’s elegiac shoals, we see how “Great griefs are antidotes / for lesser sorrows,” and in her strange, surprising narratives, we glimpse a man darting into traffic for a hubcap, “meaning to build his dream / vehicle from scrap.” These poems, too, have the feel of dreamy constructions, in which bliss “from a distance, can look like pain.” That’s the magic of this collection: it holds loss and promise in the same image—sometimes even the same word.
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