It Was Never Supposed To Be

by Ben Kline

It Was Never Supposed To Be revisits the rapid progress of queer marriage rights, beginning with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the protease inhibitor cocktails, ending after Obergefell amid previously unimaginable changes, all while asking questions about the nature of social acceptance, about what it means to love, commit and marry as former and current sexual outlaws.

100 pages, Paperback

First published December 13, 2024

About the author

Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, writing about our modern digital existence, former lovers, the Eighties, assorted concepts in astrophysics and growing up Appalachian. His chapbook of outer space/astrophysics poems Sagittarius A* was released by Sibling Rivalry Press in October 2020. His chapbook Dead Uncles arrives in May 2021 from Driftwood Press. He serves as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and as a poet whisperer for many friends.

Reviews

[Shaawan Keahna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excerpt from a forthcoming, longform review. Thank you so much to Tyler at Variant Lit for facilitating this experience for me.

It Was Never Supposed to Be dazzled me. Between the sudden dip in energy that is “I Don’t Search I Find” and the Covid-19 pandemic, Kline regains his footing. As if he’s angry about dodging the bullet of his first pandemic only to find another shot’s been fired. Or, as he says plainly in “Mitigation,” This is our second plague. The poems get snappier, the tone sharper. When he pauses to reminisce on the dead uncles who haunt the narrative, his voice strengthens tenfold, a sense of staunch determination to reach back and tether himself to his lineage. These “dead uncles” are, for those of you uninitiated in what my people call “Indian way,” not necessarily blood related to Kline, but they are his relatives.
All that said, he’s never too maudlin or melodramatic. His humor, as warm and effusive as it is bawdy and rude, lattices every statement. We readers are never bogged down in trauma or dragged through the muck of navel-gazing. Kline is far too strong a poet for that kind of thing. Even when we reach the final poem, the almost-titular “It Was Never Supposed to Be Mine,” Kline balances light and heavy, distance and closeness. The book is a film, in my mind, every shot carefully mapped out, furnished by well-chosen words, good pacing. Then that final wide shot of the sea hits and I feel a lift. There’s a hitch in my heart and I have to lean back.
Take a moment to breathe.