Cocktails

A Divine Comedy #3

by D.A. Powell

kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late
it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home

no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like
breaking glass
they return to smear the ______. and you're it
--from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]"

In Cocktails, D. A. Powell closes his contemporary Divine Comedy with poems of sharp wit and graceful eloquence born of the AIDS pandemic. These poems, both harrowing and beautiful, strive toward redemption and light within the transformative and often conflicting worlds of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Gay, Queer

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013.

Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Reviews

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cocktails is the third book of Powell’s trilogy. The first thing I noticed when reading Cocktails was his signature long line length. The book is wider than the industry standard paperback. The format of the poems was somewhat off-putting until I started reading them aloud. Powell uses minimum punctuation and abrupt phrases. His poems have a hip-hop, or rap, rhythm to them, which increases the intensity. The rhythm becomes obvious when these poems are read aloud.

The collection is divided into 3 sections, with overlap among them. The first section is called Mixology, the second Filmography, the third Bibliography. I struggled with the third section, as the poems here spring from unfamiliar stories and lines from the Gospels. The second section, using film as the cultural context, is my favorite.
After the 1985 film My Beautiful Launderette:
Love is seldom a dull chore: I know how to fold his t-shirts
how they smell before and after. washing and tumbling
[college roommate gone: his hamper full. I’ll do us both a favor]

Life as a gay man during the era of HIV/AIDS is the subtext for much of Powell’s writing. His tone is wry, his humor dry and full of irony. Many of the poems give specific reference to his own experience living with HIV.
This little treatment has side effects: side effects
including [but not limited to] Poseidon emerging from the sea
[this little treatment has side effects: side effects]

My pulse drums too: a scant crew of leukocytes raise their tiny oars
these few who have not mutinied.
[hope you like this new doctor: rachel says in hopeful tones]

Powell is a master at using double entendre. In [my lover my phlebotomist, his elastic fingers encircle my arm] Powell writes:
I rise to meet him: engorged. I wear a negligee and surgical mask

Powell’s titles, which are also the poem’s first line, are long and inventive. My favorite is [dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

Powell is a strong and proud voice of a generation of gay men living with HIV.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is a genius: amazing vocabulary and dexterity of tone. Only he could make a sexualized Santa Claus poem gruesome and heartbreaking. Ditto the poem inspired by Hook. Awesome.

[Luis Correa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always brilliant.

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've had this book for a while. I ordered it a couple years ago after a refreshing review in one of the gay magazines.

Someone did the author a favor.

I confess that I'm far from an academic poet. In fact, I despise that 'ivory tower' verse that seems to be written for a handful of other academics. It is precisely this type of poetry that has resulted in poetry's unpopular status as an art form. It has been deemed unapproachable.

Powell's 'Cocktails' takes this unapproachability to a new level. I must have glanced at a couple poems when I first got the book and promptly put it down. Only because I'm reading poetry while pedaling my fat ass on a stationary bike at the gym, did I read the entire collection.

Every poem sounded the same, every rhythm felt too familiar from the first poems. And what's with all the overarching words? Holy Christ, you need a dictionary and a medical transcriptionist to figure some of these out. Nothing deflates a poem more than having to resort to a dictionary for meaning. Isn't it bad enough that the lines themselves have been rendered undecipherable without throwing handfuls of obtuse words into them?

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

D.A. Powell is a master of using overt sexuality to mask an even more masterful underlying subtext. It's amazing how someone can toy with language in such a way a refrain can seem present within a poem were words and phrases do not repeat. Coctails shows the mundane and shocking complexity of everyday for a gay man in a city of brick and blue collar. Whereas Tea was a eulogy, a book of AIDS and loss and the lives claimed, Coctails is its opposite, its Whitmanesque singing. His approach to the line as fresh as we've come to expect, a breath both extended and stuttered all at once. Powell is a poet of the body, both its gritty reality and its Platonic ideal. He juxtaposes the voice of the poem with outside voices, song lyrics, and the occasional clip from a John Waters film. Coctails becomes D.A. Powell's Song of Myself, the perfect end-stop to his trilogy in verse.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I expected coming into this, "Cocktails" was certainly my favorite of D.A. Powell's trilogy, and I really liked both "Tea" and "Lunch." Perhaps I had been primed for this by my favorite two poems in here, both of which I had read before, "[writing for a young man on the redline train: "to his boy mistress"]" and "[when you touch down upon this earth. little reindeers]." Still, there are many poems in here to rival these. Fantastic.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Powell, desire is a many splendoured thing. Desire is every word that you can fit in your mouth, sometimes, at least if it’s giving off that keen, unctuous, sweet flavor. It all threads through the image, or homoerotic narrative, or pop culture reference. Desire is D. A. Powell and he describes it as soft, sweet, persistent rhythm.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

What many reviews of this book fail to note is the 360 degree view the book has--not just elegaic, but sexy and funny and plain and lyric and human and every other damned thing. The best thing I learned from DA Powell was that every line of a poem is a poem in itself. There's some standard to live up to.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books from poetry class this term. Powell speaks on pop culture the way past poets have spoken about Greek and Roman mythology and gives ethos to new forms of expression of the modern age.

[Christopherseelie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fabulous. Some of these poems are almost incandescent with wit. That said, the patterns becomes quickly deciphered. I could write a D.A. Powell poem after reading this book. Not a criticism, but worth noting...along with the fact that musicality is at the heart of this collection.

[Craig Morgan Teicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, I think, so far, the major book by the rising generations of poets.

[Corbin Dodge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot possibly express the emotional reaction that Cocktails provided me with. His poems about being a homosexual suffering from HIV are are realistic and harsh.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my top ten for sure.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, moving, amazing. I love this book and teach it often. Powell is also an incredible reader of his own poetry.

[Crystal Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only poetry book that has ever made me weep.

[Gerardo]

It is an interesting book. It is really hard to follow, but this is its beauty. I really enjoy it as it is a challenging book!

[connie Voisine · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one hot, sad book. loveliness.

[Molly M M · Rating 4 out of 5]

He liked my poem. But not as much as I liked his.

[elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes me like poetry again.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with Craig Teicher: Doug Powell is an important poet of his generation.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

From libidinal to biblical, Powell pushes into our corporeal beings, opens us up—often with a coy smirk—and resurrects an uncommon language from with. This collection is an unadulterated masterpiece—balanced, bold, and refreshing as any libation, and still another flavor peaks out of the palette. Powell astounds at every line, soars and restores the reader before rending a fresh meaning. From Pushkin to Altman to Lazarus of Bethany, Powell extends outward, drawing a figure-eight through history and experience. I'm left satiated and quenched and spent.

[K.V.D. K.V.D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great!! So happy sad

[Nick Pappas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not what you would call a big fan of poetry, but the work in this book is quite good. Powell is a poet who loves word play, sounds, rhyme, and structure. This book of poetry about AIDS is quite a read, though the first third is the best group in the bunch. Thats not to say there aren't gems found later on in the book. From the egnigmatic title "Cocktails", does he mean the drinks or the pills an AIDS patient takes, this book will have you thinking.

[Boxhuman · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were poems that I absolutely adore and there are some that just wash right through me. It was a lot of hot/cold. But I liked it for the most part. I liked how the tones changed, but the style remained.

He gets a point for mentioning courtesy clerks, but loses a point for mentioning My Own Private Idaho (a movie I personally detest).