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language: English (illustrations Patty Barth)
country: USA
year: 2018
form: poetry
dates read: 11.6.23
A.W. Strouse’s Transfer Queen (with drawings by Patty Barth, available open access from punctum books) is messy and kind of racist but also weirdly enthralling (I just accidentally read the whole thing in one sitting). the collection is a catalogue of fragmentary/fragmented poems about men seen on the subway (specifically on trains — one of the poems explicitly notes that platforms are excluded), speculating about their sexualities, dicks, sex lives, lives.
kind of racist — in both a fetishizing way:
if not the
designer change purse,
then the heavy mediterranean eyelids
signalize wantonness
(also what the fuck is up with that first enjambment.)
— and a just being kind of weird about race and signifiers thereof, just a little too constant about drawing attention to race, primarily when the guy in question isn’t white:
a scowling black nationalist who likes
white dudes
who rim him
— or just outright racist:
chinese boyfriend speaks to his
chinese girlfriend
with squeaky chinese accent—
why not speak chinese?
messy: even beyond the racism, it’s EXTREMELY written by a gay guy from New York who thinks New York gay culture is synonymous with gay culture period. just very New York Gay slash Gay Culture™:
he has the same
faux-leather
bag as me,
but i’m gayer
weirdly enthralling: the form of the collection does feel very much like me looking at guys on the subway (although the details of his assessments are…the way they are) — the fragmentary glimpses, incomplete fantasies, assumptions and impositions, …
his restless leg syndrome
in a three-piece suit
is an index of
a hungry hole
also at times it’s funny, as in the repeated invocations of “my hot cousin SEAN”:
some white dude
who looks
like my hot cousin SEAN
47 pages later:
another white dude
who looks
like my hot cousin SEAN
21 pages later:
a dude who looks
like my hot cousin SEAN
in a YALE t-shirt
242 pages later:
receding hairline
like a ruined
greek amphitheater
and a face like my hot cousin SEAN
lmao.
would I recommend it, overall? not really, no.
moods: horny, lighthearted