Fantasia for the Man in Blue
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Opening with a line from Hilton Al's essay "GWTW," (shorthand for "Gone with the Wind") the searing debut from Blount is magnetic and controlled. Through charged words, masterful line breaks, and ekphrasis and persona pieces, these poems blur the line between intimacy and violence. Describing a fight with his brother, the speaker asks, "do we, in our hold, this hug, this pushing,/ not appear as feuding lovers?" Blount's subject matter ranges from gay pornographic film actors to the art of Henri Matisse and Kehinde Wiley. He celebrates the strength of female impersonators Lattice Royale of RuPaul's Drag Race fame and Savannah's Lady Chablis. He updates Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" to a modern and explicit "Arcane Torso on Grindr," exploring both queer desire and the potential violence of that desire: "our bodies are records of where we've been." Visiting a historic site early in the morning, Blount observes, "it makes for a lovely setting for white/ weddings, picnics, guided tours./ I'm afraid of this big house/ when it is dark like this;/ when I am dark like this." Blount memorably and viscerally explores the intersection of power, sexuality, and race.
