In the Time of PrEP

by Jacques J. Rancourt

"In this country, AIDS is no longer a quick death sentence. Jacques J. Rancourt, born the year AZT was released, makes visible its wreckage in the present. The plague years—queer bodies kissed by death and public scorn—shadow the speaker as he cruises, travels, and marries. Living and loss collide, twine."

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

36 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2018

About the author

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of two full-length collections, Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), as well as a chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). Raised in Maine, he lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Katie Schmid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this achy, haunted little book.

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here we are, "In the Time of PrEP," and also we are in the history of what came before, for even those who escaped getting AIDS in the 80s and 90s have a legacy that cannot be ignored. Jacques J. Rancourt brings us the now in this after time with language that sings. In the poem "Polaris Still Burning" he writes, "Whatever I expected,/it was not that the dungeon/would be stone quiet, that the men/pacing the halls for sex would be/polite. They, like me, came out after,/while in the center pool, the old/men soak." Here with sensitivity he shows us this new world overlaid against its former shadows. He observes the men who knew the past as they lounge in the pool: "They are like a council of stars,//lit blue from underneath. They laugh/silently & touch each other,/or float on their backs, staring up/at the show of lights on the ceiling./They lean their heads against/each other as water falls in pearls/from their soft arms, half/in this world, half in another."

In this chapbook with many poems set in San Francisco, he points out the great changes, the great losses, the poem "I Don't Go To Gay Bars Anymore," opens with, "someone tells me & sure enough/another boards up soon there won't be//a need for places like these any more/there's a word for what we lose". A lament that, "somewhere a western mall/still holds our prayers in its teeth".

In the poem "Golden Gate Park," we get a snippet of a walk, a kiss, "like those men/of our fathers' era/who'd rendezvous/in parks past dark." Intertwined with a memory from childhood, "I felt endless then/& knowing I wasn't/only enlarged me." He gives us his poem Litany, with its series of petitions. This is a book of grace. This is a book where faith is examined, as in his poem "Near the Sheep Gate," John 5:1-4, where he writes, "I once believed/faith was a place/I lived inside//myself where the prayers/for the sick did not/become prayers//for the dead. Where/all could be dipped/to be cured,//transformed,/made new."

I love this book, love the cover art by Barton Lidicé Beneš (1942-2012). HIV positive he created a series of art using his own blood. When his installation was to go to Sweden they insisted it be heated to 160 degrees F to make it "safe" for the audiences. I had not heard this story and I'm grateful his artwork was allowed to be used for this exquisite book.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2013, the Colorado Front Range suffered a devastating 500-year flood. I'd lived in the area for 30 years, but had moved away just two years before. I watched in agony, in real time, as houses were swept away. When Twitter said a dam above my old neighborhood might have been breached, I called my old neighbors at 1 AM, begging them to leave. Later, watching, mostly via Facebook, as friends tried to rebuild, if they could. I found myself in unknown emotional territory. I was relieved, of course, that we'd sold our house and didn't have to deal with the damage and the washed-out road. But I also felt that I'd missed out--that I wasn't *there,* working shoulder-to-shoulder with friends and neighbors, dealing with the disaster, just going through it together, as we'd gone through a wildfire just a couple of years before that. Or so many more ordinary but eventual things. The Blizzard of 82. The canyon shooter. Divorces, changes in our parenting trajectories. Mountain lions in our driveways, extinct lynx running across our trails before they were reintroduced. I was part of was all this stuff when I left, and now, when much of it washed down the mountainsides and canyons where I had lived my entire adult life, I no longer belonged there.

I imagined that 9/11 probably had a similar, strange impact (probably more intense) on former New Yorkers. Maybe you lived your whole childhood there, but when something like this happens it’s not your town in the same way it was. Not the way it is to those who still live there. It’s just not your disaster, exactly. You’re a cousin now, or a second cousin, or possibly once removed.

It’s very hard to explain this. I’m trying, and maybe you’re getting it, and maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re thinking: survivor’s guilt. Many have said that to me: Oh, survivor’s guilt. But that’s not it. Survivor’s guilt is when you DO go through something with others and you make it but they don’t. Like if my house had been fine but my neighbor’s had washed away. Or my neighbor had been killed in a mudslide. Which happened to someone in the town where I used to get my mail.

But I didn’t go through it, so I didn’t survive. I escaped it entirely. And I don’t feel guilty. I feel regretful. Nostalgic maybe. Like I missed something, even though I’m not an idiot and don’t actually wish I went though something as awful as having my house flooded.

It is irresponsible to compare, as many have done, the aftermath of this flood to a war zone, but it was shocking all the same…not just the upended houses, cars buried in mud, knocked-down trees. But the ravaged landscape. Places where there had been just the slightest seam in a hillside, hardly even visible, not even a spot for runoff—now ripped to broad ravines filled with boulders. The landscape completely changed—these will be side canyons in the near future. The canyon as I lived in it will not be remembered that way MUCH sooner than anyone was counting on in geological time.

What has anything of this got to do with Jacques Rancourt’s poetry? Mostly it’s a long and self-indulgent intro to this very powerful chapbook, which, IMO, manages to get at this feeling I’ve been trying to describe quite nicely, even if for a very different reason and from a different angle.
Rancourt is writing about having for the most part missed AIDS. Having grown up in the aftermath of a holocaust, in which so much of your tribe was wiped out, in which the elders are still reeling with grief and shock. You yourself can exist in relative safety due to medical advances, though not without the ever-present knowledge, not only of what’s happened or what can happen, but of the indifference and prejudice that allowed it to go so far.

Do you want to have lived through the time of the illness? No, but you feel wrong about your safety as well. As if you’re cheating somehow. Is this survivor’s guilt? If so, what is it that you have survived? Is it even guilt? It’s a kind of grief—grief for people you never got to know, a community that was torn through and through, grief for a different kind of safety—the safety of taking risks—grief for, well, what I just said, I guess. The chance to live a life with some rougher edges. Now it’s safer, but. Something seems missing and it’s not just the people.

Or maybe that’s what you imagine.

It’s not as if you’re not grateful for the new drugs.

THE END HAS NOT YET PASSED OVER US
That God first placed an angel
with a flaming sword to guard
Eden’s gates; that pleasure could poison;
that we could be punished

further; that the Death Horse blazed
through here & did not stop for me
though I asked it to, though I reached out a hand
to course my fingers through its mane—

I knew. Snow falls. Termites eat out
the tree’s giant heart. I wish
I could remain unchanged had the plague passed
through me. I wish

the geranium back to bloom, the frost to the eaves,
the fire back to the candles
the children carried through the orchard
the night it burned down. I watch

the woman flatten the snake with her foot
just to see how much blood it holds,
but what does this have to do with God?
I was careless, yes, & spared.

IN THE CASTRO
Rainbow banners like war flags
over the Chevron station—Brothers,

did you dream of greener, wetter places?
Sometimes I look down

At, say, light catching a crushed
Coke bottle on the pavement &, like that,

slip through to a time when all this meant
something different. In these streets you marched,

we march from one club to the next,
bored on mojitos. I want to knock on each door

long before dawn, until one of them
opens itself to me with fingers still caked

with wax. There are moments I get lost
in time, drawn low into that broken

glass throat, & then this place becomes
its very name: a buttress, _Castro_, these streets

where here alone we link pinkies
waiting for the bus. & then in shop windows Polaroids

of strange purple cancers & then we’re out
marching our candles down Market

& out marching our candles down
Market & out marching our candles—

but I came too late.

[brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

not quite my style of poetry, but some nice moments. was unfortunately expecting a bit more out of this. quick and heavy

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

"... Always
I am the one leaving or the one who is left.
Nothing has ended; what has happened before
will happen again."

[Joanna’s Reading Rainbow · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Aching yet beautiful poems about the men who sought love but found death at hands of AIDS. The only reason it’s not higher is because some styles of poetry resonate more with me than other styles. I liked the content but not so much the way it was written.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and short volume that packs a punch way over its length.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a devastatingly beautiful and surprising little book.