Muster Points

by Lucas Crawford

In March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems. Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a “fancy academic” who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire. As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, LGBT, Queer

80 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2023

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

June is Pride Month and my first read this month was MUSTER POINTS by Lucas Crawford. I really enjoyed this poetry book! This collection explores queer love, isolation, trans self identity and pleasure. My fave poems are Emotion, Lesser-Known Wellness Workbooks, Girls Who Like Ani DiFranco, and One Day, Your Grandmother. I also really liked how the cover art by Morgan Sea reflects the contents. There’s a poem titled A Better Poem About Peanut Butter.

Thank you to University of Calgary Press and ZG Stories for my gifted review copy!

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you University of Calgary Press for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review

I just want to start off by saying I am thankful that this book has a warning page is that is really important. While this isn’t my usual type of poetry, I still enjoyed reading through all the different poems. I liked how open the author was about difficult subjects, and it was refreshing to read poetry about queerness because you don’t see that often. I wasn’t able to connect to the poem as much as I want to, but I would recommend this book for others who enjoy this type of explicit poetry.