Blue Ashes: Selected Poems: 1982–1998

by Jean-Paul Daoust

"Few taboos are left to incorporate into the literature of the gay world. Nearly everything has been said, sensationalized, exploited, done and redone, sometimes well, sometimes self-indulgently. But one taboo, sex between adults and children, has received little attention from serious writers for a very good most people, gay or otherwise, find it morally repugnant. Incredibly, Jean-Paul Daoust has turned a relationship of this kind into hypnotic poetry. The book is unique in its sensitivity to a universe of forbidden love and sex between a man in his early twenties and a boy of six and a half years. The boy’s age is used like a leitmotif, recurring on nearly every page of the poem, as though to remind the reader of how unique the experience is, whether between straight persons or gay. Because of the critical age difference between manhood and childhood, it is not ‘just another love story.’ It is an epic melodrama of passion, love, betrayal and cruelty that is related here in obsessive, often hallucinatory poetry, but more importantly, it is all seen through the eyes of a child who is not only a victim as we might readily suppose, but an aggressor as well. Gay literature will never be the same after this book" – Daniel Sloate.

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1999