Impersonal Rainbow and The Bisexual Purge

by Paul Killebrew

A dazzling new double-bill about being alive these times, by Paul Killebrew, who John Ashbery said "plunges us into a world we inhabit but seldom notice, forcing its horror on us but also reminding us why we go on coping with it." Paul Killebrew's new book contains two distinct and brilliant IMPERSONAL RAINBOW gathers short meditations on life and its many sensations; THE BISEXUAL PURGE is a long poem which discusses "legal developments, cases, and arguments about both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination" while following events both personal and public during 2017. "Paul Killebrew's THE BISEXUAL PURGE is a unique and wonderful a documentary work that keeps twisting back on itself, a poem of identity that admits the puniness and fragility of the author's own political individuality, an Ashberyish linguistic haze that clears itself to examine honestly the 'promiscuity' of language in the service of power."--Jay Aquinas Thompson in Poetry Northwest Poetry. Essay. Histroy. LGBTQIA+ Studies.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

176 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 2023

Reviews

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn’t say that any of the works of Impersonal Rainbow really did it for me but the sheer audacity and mastery of the writing of the nonfiction poem The Bisexual Purge earns an easy 5 stars from me.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killebrew opens with this string of “impersonal” poems that are assuredly about personal moments, but maybe not personal to the poet. Maybe their impersonality illustrates more what language can fall into. In particular, how fragments of language can register a moment, put the moment in sequence with other fragments, and the original moment shifts. Yes, a poet is guiding one fragment to the next (as in, it’s the poet’s impulse to take advantage of syntactic units, and run them against each other), but the sentence mechanics would be the impersonal part. And what I wonder in this particular book is if this interaction between impersonal and personal in the opening section (the “Impersonal Rainbow” section) would be a comment on queerness, the fact of sexuality each person has, and then how that sexuality becomes part of who they are through their life experiences.

It would have to be what’s essentially a mirror relation to the longer poem, “The Bisexual Urge.” Where a legal language interdependent on many different sides, where one judge can speak from a position, and another judge can speak from an opposed position, and yet another can speak from a position that opposes some portion of the previous judge’s opposition. And these relations juxtapose into a series of precedents spelling out how laws should be interpreted and then enforced. What amounts to a mosaic of legalities that will never fully be codified. A carefully orchestrated and extended sentence navigating repetitions and modifications the way Gertrude Stein might handle sentences in her book, The Making of Americans.

Killebrew’s commentary and assessment on the beginning of Trump’s Presidency, both as someone educated in legal precedent and application of legal practices is further emphasized by his position within the Justice Department. And perhaps the greatest accomplishment is his voice, which maintains its taut but casual diction, spelling out his understanding, quoting from legal positions, and still feeling like it’s a conversation he’s interested in having with his reader. Even if it proves, by 2024, to be like Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Who he’s talking to has lived well beyond the events in this poem. And what is the present tense for him in 2017 supposed to communicate to people living seven years later?