Description

Poetry
102 pp.
7″x9″
May 15, 2024
ISBN 978-1-7346911-5-3

What binds these poems together is a desire to speak what goes unspoken. To reply into the void of empire and late capitalism with a howl of authenticity, not trying to separate parts of the self or parts of the culture, but to exist in all of it at once. This book is a portrait of survival through speech, story, politics, celebrity/star gazing, TV, and all forms of popular music. These poems engage with “Western tradition” and its unraveling, focusing on an economically insecure adjunct life in Pittsburgh, PA which is—against all odds—interrupted by love that entails moving to a safer country. These poems exist in conversation with the author’s conservative Catholic upbringing, anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, and poets ranging from Sappho to Elizabeth Bishop to Eazy-E. The poems inhabit a world where John Wayne stars in Manhattan and Rush Limbaugh stars in Boys Don’t Cry, with elegies to Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, finally culminating in a finale where the author rewrites (or translates, or reboots, or “covers”) T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (with a little help from Cyndi Lauper and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

R/B Mertz (they/them) is a trans/non-binary butch poet and artist. They were raised inside Catholic fundamentalism, about which they wrote the memoir Burning Butch (Unnamed Press, 2022), which was a finalist for Memoir Magazine‘s Best Memoir Grand Prize. They also wrote the essay, “How Whiteness Kills God & Sprinkles Crack on the Body”; (Mistress Syndrome) and the play “Where the Heart Is” (Another Chicago Magazine). Mertz taught writing in Pittsburgh for eleven years and was honored to be a finalist for City of Asylum’s 2020-21 Emerging Poet Laureate of Pittsburgh. On January 1, 2021, Mertz left the US for love, and they now reside in Toronto, Ontario, traditionally the territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. They teach writing at Sheridan College.