With the Boys

by Fred Spoliar

There’s no escaping adjacency to the boys as an institution (so invulnerable! so fragile!) but are the boys themselves our enemies? Can they be lovers, even comrades? In this beautiful and playful book fred spoliar unravels worlds of gender and work to tease a poetry of pain and joy from the smouldering present.

100 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 2021

Reviews

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoying with the boys with the boys

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

!!! Al Anderson on the blurb describes this as 'communist poetry that's queer as fuck' and fred spoliar delivers something exuberant and delightful dripping I wish I perspired this kind of chaos.

Think it's fair to say we're seeing a 'botanical turn' in poetry lately and I don't just mean ecopoetry is on the rise (of course it is but has been for a couple decades) but we're seeing PLANTS get love and that's not exactly what fs is doing here it's urbanised but so adjacent I think this comes from their reading of Alice Notley and so forth but I don't want to make assumptions. I just see this as an interesting alternative in that field (pun ha ha).

I'm a huge fan of many poems here but favourites include Lying prostrate and raised into crisis
Keen for whatever comes next from them xx