Pink Noise

These poems are flecked with quartz and risk, love and dejection, pink and blood-red ecstatic brooding. Kevin’s line redirects consciousness to the magic of forgotten minutia and overlooked associative deliverance “from cypress to pine before / fierce queen on a blank stage.” His language sets that stage for a tenderness that is in no way meek, for a sense of divinity found where life is. His is one of the voices that sets the bar for what poetry can do in this world.

A queer lyric—like a queer body—holds within itself culture’s dueling impulses. In Kevin Holden’s singular poetics, libido’s lavish disordering resists rationality’s drive toward “the war and reality / of our clear / civilization.” What results is a “rose tone row,” a nonce musical system he calls Pink Noise. Here queer experience sings alongside angular, abstract phrases sampled from math and science. Beautifully resisting conventional beauty, Holden makes atonal music whose fine phrasing “glints, glitters, shines, shimmers, glows.”

This book is like a vardøger. I felt it before it arrived—“a former ghost.” Holden’s formations come together, crystalline and spinning, into consummate shape. Geometry, mathematics, gay sex, earth, cosmos, mysticism, and skepticism are held together in these pages as in a polyhedron, semitransparent, where each facet is visible at a certain angle but from another angle disappears to show a facet on the shape’s opposite side. Beautiful and distinct, this work is filled with discrete infinities.

Beyond anything this side of Finnegans Wake. Holden is fields and particles away, really, from all previous mutations of language. He writes like an appointed medium for the sun.