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Capsid: A Love Song
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Gawker, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Feminist Wire, where he is an Associate Editor. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow in systems biology at New York University.
Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-form essay that incorporates eight prose poems, each one inspired by a different phase in the life cycle of HIV. A person infected with a virus is called a host, and that makes the virus the guest, and sometimes a guest becomes a friend, and sometimes a friend becomes a lover. Osmundson explores the intimacy of the relatioinship between an HIV-positive person and his virus. His scientific perspective makes this young gay man an especially poignant singer of this love song.
Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-form essay that incorporates eight prose poems, each one inspired by a different phase in the life cycle of HIV. A person infected with a virus is called a host, and that makes the virus the guest, and sometimes a guest becomes a friend, and sometimes a friend becomes a lover. Osmundson explores the intimacy of the relatioinship between an HIV-positive person and his virus. His scientific perspective makes this young gay man an especially poignant singer of this love song.
52 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2016
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November 8, 2017This is a good book for hetero folks to read if you're as ignorant as I am about the stigmas surrounding AIDS that continue to dominate the lives of many in queer communities. We be dumb, straight boys. so dumb
The slimness of this volume first made me think it was a prose poem. It wasn't until the end that I read it's meant to be read as an essay. Strange how genre expectations can impact your reading. I liked this a lot, but the genre thing had me looking for things that were not there because Osmundson perhaps wasn't attending to those things in the way I imagined he ought to (and why should he do anything based on genre expectations anyway?).
The slimness of this volume first made me think it was a prose poem. It wasn't until the end that I read it's meant to be read as an essay. Strange how genre expectations can impact your reading. I liked this a lot, but the genre thing had me looking for things that were not there because Osmundson perhaps wasn't attending to those things in the way I imagined he ought to (and why should he do anything based on genre expectations anyway?).
September 4, 2024
lectura de una sentada, sencillita pero necesaria para acercarse más a la realidad de las vivencias con VIH. Me hacía falta porque es un tema sobre el que no sabía mucho y es fácil creerse bulos...
Le daría 3.5 estrellitas !!
Le daría 3.5 estrellitas !!
June 12, 2023
Joe draws interesting parallels between virus biology and relationships. It was oddly poetic and loved how accurate the science was!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews