Periodic Boyfriends by Drew Pisarra, Capturing Fire Press, 154 pages.
Review by Chad Frame
As humans, we’re flesh and bone—but we’re also oxygen and carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. We’re our experiences, joys, dreams, and traumas, but we’re also the people we’ve encountered—those who’ve enriched our lives, and those who’ve left us, taking with them a part of us.
In his ambitious collection, Periodic Boyfriends, Drew Pisarra builds, entirely through sonnets, the periodic table of his life as a gay man, one man-turned-element at a time. Other than the opening poem, “The Periodic Boyfriend,” which lays out for the reader the concept of the book (“Love and Sex possess like chemistries / when I survey my carnal history…”), each poem is titled the name of an element, in atomic order, from hydrogen to lawrencium.
Additionally, there are two subsections, “The Lanthanides” and “The Actinides,” both of which are introduced by a double-length sonnet (“Lanthanum” and “Actinium,” respectively). I suppose, for the sake of symmetry, I briefly wondered why there weren’t sections like this throughout, including Alkali Metals, Noble Gasses, and so forth—but this reader is far from a chemist, and can’t judge such things. In fact, as a gay poet who dearly loves both high concept book ideas and forms, this collection felt like it was written for me specifically.
But Periodic Boyfriends is a concept that doesn’t rely on its novelty or on its form. Rather, it expands what a sonnet can be, with Pisarra showing the full range of the time-honored art, at times elevating it into beautiful ode, and at times relishing in its ability to emulate a bawdy limerick. Like the gay relationships these poems address, things are complicated, fully addressing that feelings are often at odds with or even confused for lust—and vice-versa.
And the titles (and corresponding assignments of elements) aren’t arbitrary. As much as possible, Pisarra attempts in each poem to marry its namesake element to the unnamed person about whom it’s written, with very clever results. “Iron,” for example, begins with “Your mother pressed the clothes, you kept the books / at a dry cleaners in Fort Greene.” The opening to “Oxygen” is “In bed, I once dubbed you necessary.” And, in “Promethium,” the expected reference to the Titan progenitor of mankind comes midway through the poem, “One of us ended up the first to taste fire, the first / to wick dip, the first to pair off, to cheat…”
Pisarra shows not only a keen understanding of chemistry theory and poetic craft, but of psychology and human relationships. These poems are, by turns, incisive, beautiful, salacious, wistful, and flat-out entertaining. Pisarra presents us with clever and cutting one-liners (“If you’re my choice, I’d rather masturbate,” from “Aluminum”), insightful aphorisms (“One’s first validation in being queer / can happen that quick. Coming out takes years” from “Livermorium”), and pearl-clutchingly precise levels of sexual detail (“I can see inside the crack where the floss / of his chartreuse thong fails to hide his anal eye,” from “Uranium”). While an agile reader can keep up and appreciate all of this, the episodic nature of the poems also allows one to open to any page and find something to treasure and enjoy
Periodic Boyfriends is a book that, like a good chemistry lesson, knows exactly how to keep things varied and interesting to keep the audience’s interest. Here, a cracked beaker of heartbreak. There, an excited spurt of fluid from an energetic reaction. While we predictably end on “Lawrencium,” we are left with a final line both vocative and evocative, a direct address that serves to not only speak to everyone from the poet’s past, but everyone reading, too. Simply and profoundly, Pisarra closes by giving permission to do what should come naturally to us, like breathing, like making love—if our instincts weren’t thwarted by our intellects. “You be you,” the speaker says. “We’ll figure out where you fit.”
Breakaway by Joey Nicoletti, Broadstone Books, 2023, 86 page.
Reviewed by Christina Marrocco
Breakaway is another showstopper for the heart by poet Joey Nicoletti. I recommend you add it to your library post haste. It will transport you not just to the past but to the way we grow and grew, surrounded by equal parts love and fear, the ratios often in flux.
Nicoletti is a poet who never hides, nor does he strut. His presence is like that of a lunar moth in the light, mesmerizing in simple beauty, fairly glowing. We begin with the poem “Cravings” in which Nicoletti, grown and having left his origin family for adulthood, speaks from a San Francisco hotel room, imagining and reimagining love in a voice both innocent and resplendent in a reverent sexuality: “San Francisco, how sweet you talk/ at night, whispering your misty history/ into the open majestic mouth/ of my hotel room window.”
And from there, from that hotel window of the adult Nicoletti, we are whooshed back to childhood, to the immediate and gritty “Back Issues” which begins with one of the most brutal and identifiable stanzas I’ve ever encountered:
You break the neighbor’s window, I break you.
my father said before he threw me
against the dresser
in his and my mother’s bedroom.
“Back Issues” with its title double entendre, like all of Nicoletti’s poems in this collection, moves fluidly through connections to pain and love. In this case addressing the physical pain of what’s “cutting my gut” and visiting the attendant questions about what parents should be—perhaps closer to super heroes than reality might have. Nicoletti deftly transverses the ability children who have experienced physical abuse have to both understand the generational layering of behaviors without minimizing the gut cutting. There’s no sugar coating here, nor is there simply a surface glance or lack of love.
The specter of domestic violence stays put, as it does in a household that experiences it, but life in Breakaway is multifaceted and beautiful at the same time. As it is in “real life.” This Nicoletti dips into complex relationships, music, baseball, poetry itself, comics, heroes, love, the political landscape, and hunger for acceptance. Joy. And yes, joy.
The writing is always clear, strong, fresh, sensitive, natural, and evocative—with strong verisimilitude. Readers will enter each poem feeling as if they are sitting beside Nicoletti, a quiet friend who uses a variety of form and subject matter that coalesces like the most beautiful buttercream frosting. In fact, his “The Sweetness of Buttercream” exemplifies this ability as he brings to the surface passes and impasses between himself and his father, their lasting nature, and the attempts of both men to right the ship through time.
While the collection deals with difficult experiences deftly, it also wears Nicoletti’s smooth sense of humor, often mixed with dark disbelief as in “Teaching Tools” a poem of questions aimed at his childhood father including “For instance, did I hear you correctly/when you said Buddha is/ a four-letter word? And yet, the subtle humor accompanies such wrenching introspection into his relationship with his father as in the final stanzas of the poem:
Am I allowed to listen
to my mouth
when it suggests zeppoles, especially
if the powdered sugar melting
on my delighted tongue
helps me to understand
that it’s better for me
to feed my curiosity
instead of my frustration?
Breakaway is a book of poetry to savor, each and every poem a perfect gift, culminating in the sheer joy of “My Rebirth” and the beautiful biographical coda “Breakaway” both of which I hold back from spoiling by too much raving. Yes, it’s a book to savor, but I doubt readers will be able to resist reading straight through. I couldn’t. I savored each poem and then was drawn immediately into the next and the next and the next. Every poem is an alcove of something unique, special, recognizable. This is the sort of collection that sheds light on all of us. This is how poetry is done
Soundtrack of a Life: New and Selected Poems by Gil Fagiani (English and Italian Edition) Legas Press. 176 pages.
Reviewed by Matthew Carriello
There’s no better title for Gil Fagiani’s collection than Soundtrack of a Life because these poems are musical. Not only are they filled with references to song (mostly R&B and Soul from the 50s and 60s) but the writing itself has a consistent, propulsive movement to it, a beat and rhythm that compels the reader forward. The effect is similar to what novelist John Gardner called profluence, which is what makes us turn the page again and again because it seems as if we’re going somewhere. In a sense, this book, and Fagiani’s work as a whole, is a fractured chronicle in the postmodern mode, a story that resists but doesn’t repudiate traditional narrative clarity. Think of a vinyl LP with all its tracks in a particular order, connected thematically but without overt references to one another.
Fagiani, who passed away in 2018 at 73, started to publish poetry in his fifties. The poems in this volume cover all of his too-brief writing career, with selection form each of his books.
The earlier poems show us a writer coming to terms with the power of language. The first poem in the book, “Paradiso,” is a poem about singing that sings:
Ninna-nanna, ninna-nanna
Nonna sings
bouncing her laughing
fat-cheeked
naked grandson
on her knee.
Here we see a writer with a natural sense of the work that words can do. The first two lines sway through soft consonants, the third line echoes the second, rhyming “sings” with “bouncing” and “laughing,” introducing the staccato of the next two lines’ hard /k/s before returning to the softness of “knee,” that includes, fortuitously, a silent /k/. In later books,Fagiani develops a narrative mode that lasts through the rest of his career. Poems like “Grandpa’s Wine” and “Chippies” are portraits of family members that describe without judgement their virtues and flaws:
Sometimes I would look at him
sitting for hours in a beach chair
despised by his daughter-in-law
polluting the Connecticut countryside
with the reek of Chianti
and his fat Italian cigars.
In later poems, that narrative impulse come to fruition and takes on an elegiac urgency in poems like “No Glove,” “Cold-Blooded,” and, particularly, “The Freak,” a poem about street racing that reads like a hero’s journey and ends with the protagonist’s car disappearing into the Connecticut River. “Surprise Party,” “Stone Walls,” and “I Meet Dad High on Heroin,” all mine the family dynamic and begin to reveal important details about the narrator’s sense of self.
The poems pull from Fagiani’s rich and often hectic life: a troubled teenager in Stamford Connecticut; a plebe and then upperclassmen at a military college in Pennsylvania; a soldier in Vietnam; a drug addict in Spanish Harlem and then as an addiction counselor. The poems are filled with the harrowing details of each facet of his life, but don’t stop at despair. Social critique is at the heart of A blanquito in el barrio, which is perhaps the most complex of Fagiani’s books. In it we find a kind of double discourse, as the poet chronicles both his own drug addiction and the social dynamic of the barrio in which he has embedded himself, half by design, half by chance. These are love poems in the purest sense. “Sweet Dreams in Spanish Harlem” describes the destruction of an illegal snow cone cart by the police:
Out of the mouths
of broken bottles
syrupy streams
of purple, green,
and orange
inch their way
across the sidewalk
There’s beauty here, in the midst of violence. Fagiani’s first impulse is toward empathy in “La Botanica,” “Willie and the White Girl,” but that empathy is mitigated by his own addiction, which he’s never quite able to explain to himself or his readers. In “Blood Oath,” he says “I never resigned myself to being a junkie / never put myself on the same level as the fiends / in East Harlem…” For Fagiani, the terrors of the high are real as the joys. In the epic “Crossing 116th Street,” he becomes immobilized as the acid hits:
Feet stuck in pink peanut butter,
skin peeling off my arms
Exposing bones, tendons, muscles.
…
roaches pour out my eyes.
rats run through my intestines.
The later poems mark recovery, as Fagiani turns from being an addict to treating addicts. Again, the first impulse is toward empathy, whether talking about prostitutes in “The Meat Market” or the unfulfilled aspirations of Miss Hunter, a manager for the Office of Mental Health, who was found dead with “two packs of Gypsy Good Time / playing cards, / and a book on how to interpret dreams / for love and money.”
There’s an undercurrent throughout the collection, one common to poets’ lives, that sees the self as a wrong thing but the world as more wrong still. In this way, the poet never settles on easy answers, always questions assumptions, and sometimes deliberately steps away from simple joys to look for larger truths. In “Surprise Party,” Fagiani describes of day of solitary reverie “past the culvert that brought the brook / from under the street into my backyard.” Here, he’s at ease with the natural world, speaking to turtles, frogs, and snakes as peers. When he returns home for dinner, the young boy steps into a surprise birthday party. The poem ends with the speaker mortified at the attention being paid to him by others. Instinctively,
I shrank from them,
slipped out the back door
to the brook and the backyard,
fleeing through the culvert’s mouth,
spider webs clinging to my face,
dampness swallowing me,
the echo of Mom’s voice
no longer reaching my princedom.
Throughout Fagiani’s work, there’s an impulse to be alone, to radically separate oneself from others, to be the observer of life. Paradoxically, this separation brings one closer to full participation in the world. The poem, formed from a defiant act of estrangement, engages the reader by saying “I too have felt this way.” Each poem in this collection reaches out to breach the gap between reader and writer. As readers, we’re asked to stitch together the individual fragments into a coherent whole, which is the soundtrack of a life.