Don’t Leave Me This Way

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Poetry

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Additional information

Weight .25 lbs
Format

eBook, Paperback

Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

Praise

Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet’s “promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,” this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature’s bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle.

-Brian Teare
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Details
ISBN: 978-1-643-62176-0
Paperback, 80 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: August 8, 2023
Reviews

From the salty, gorgeous fragmented segments of the opening section, Telemachy, to the slurping and fucking of a Dugas section—Sneathen artfully and archly builds something urgent, erotic, elegiac, and vitally archival.

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Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Alameda, CA. He is the author of Snail Poems (2016) and Don’t Leave Me This Way (2023). With …

More about Eric Sneathen