Poetry. The Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Kevin McLellan shows us the fissures in life and language, and takes those gaps as queer opportunities for self and word, so that, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, we find ourselves more truly and more strange. Here, as loneliness collects, music and silence intertwine, revealing patterns in the ordinary that are at once austere and playful, patterns that invite us to join in this project of reclaiming the unrequited.
Says Gabrielle Calvocoressi, "Vulnerable, sexy, hopeful, and in every way human, Kevin McLellan's in other words you / is a wonder. I was brought so deeply into the intimacy, the neighborliness of the worlds McLellan opens to. In this beautiful book the invitation of the / is also testament to a world where AIDS and so many ruptures have robbed us of generations: that devastation, that yearning for new connection. But how? How do we keep reaching out, running through the rain past the neighbors, asking someone to meet for a cheese and pickle sandwich? I loved these poems and felt like crying almost the whole time. Is this elegy? Insofar as it is also deep, deep celebration. The world goes on somehow. This book is the somehow."
Timothy Liu adds, "This book traffics in the second person. These queer meditations are both directly addressed to and overheard by a beloved You-Self / Other / Reader conjoined in a dance of enjambed vocables, a syntactic pas de deux of monostiches and couplets punctuated by fragmentary prose epistles. We are reminded of the demands that the libido makes, the joys of (w)rote habits ruptured by the new, all of it backed up by an Eighties soundtrack pulsing hard out of the Castro all the way to the U.K. So fasten your seatbelts. The you you left with will not be the same you upon return."