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No Doubt I Will Return A Different Man
Praise for NO DOUBT I WILL RETURN A DIFFERENT MAN:
Wray’s poems are wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech, where a word like family might mean, in the queer parlance, refuge, but also, refutation. This is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under “razor-wire stars.” RANDALL MANN
No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man explores how complicated relationships between fathers and sons cast long shadows over the future self. In Wray’s poems, eros shades at times uncomfortably into social violence and self-abnegation, making this book both love song and elegy to masculinity and its performances, to queerness, and to self-invention. Wray’s sharp-eared lyrics move between the darkly campy and the sublime, proving that paternal elegies themselves are “queer things” whose shifting modes allow him to investigate the limits of fatherhood itself. PAISLEY REKDAL
Situated in the long posterity of one of the most infamously shattered queer lives, this tense excavation of Alan Turing, this careful and sumptuous overlay of men’s secrecies and assignations seventy years apart, is fascinating. No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man delves for origins, stirs encryption with erotics, and makes “caught looking” palpable in its thrill and thrall. BRIAN BLANCHFIELD
TOBIAS WRAY’s writing has appeared in journals including Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, Third Coast, and The Georgia Review as well as The Queer Nature Anthology and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures. He served as a poetry editor for Cream City Review and holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas.
Wray’s poems are wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech, where a word like family might mean, in the queer parlance, refuge, but also, refutation. This is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under “razor-wire stars.” RANDALL MANN
No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man explores how complicated relationships between fathers and sons cast long shadows over the future self. In Wray’s poems, eros shades at times uncomfortably into social violence and self-abnegation, making this book both love song and elegy to masculinity and its performances, to queerness, and to self-invention. Wray’s sharp-eared lyrics move between the darkly campy and the sublime, proving that paternal elegies themselves are “queer things” whose shifting modes allow him to investigate the limits of fatherhood itself. PAISLEY REKDAL
Situated in the long posterity of one of the most infamously shattered queer lives, this tense excavation of Alan Turing, this careful and sumptuous overlay of men’s secrecies and assignations seventy years apart, is fascinating. No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man delves for origins, stirs encryption with erotics, and makes “caught looking” palpable in its thrill and thrall. BRIAN BLANCHFIELD
TOBIAS WRAY’s writing has appeared in journals including Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, Third Coast, and The Georgia Review as well as The Queer Nature Anthology and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures. He served as a poetry editor for Cream City Review and holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas.
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
Published October 5, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 13, 2021
So many brilliant, bold rhetorical moves and such twilit, theatrical imagery (the cover is very appropriate). I was enthralled with the later poems, especially. Highly recommended.
March 13, 2022
I met Tobias Wray about 15 years ago. A friend introduced us before a storytelling show, and we immediately hit it off - I had an MA in literature, and he was soon heading off to Arkansas (where my father is from) to pursue his Ph.D in poetry. He was bright, insightful, and seemed a kind, gentle young man; and who gets a Ph.D. in Poetry? We talked for maybe an hour and I never saw him again. Through the magic of Facebook I was alerted when he achieved his doctorate and to the publication of this book.
As any of my Goodreads followers know, I don't feel qualified to review poetry. Though I studied lit and have recently developed a real taste for contemporary poetry, I don't have the language to critique. I can only say that this collection overflows with a beautiful, painful immersion in... not so much pain as the critique of pain. Though the pain is visceral and far from detached, it is always filtered through the mesh of meaning. We can't get to the why of the abuser - whether a parent, the government, a lover - but that doesn't mean we don't look for meaning in the abuse, and patterns, and connections.
The connections between physical abuse and fear of difference, between war and chemical castration, between *gross indecency* laws and domestic abuse, between discovering the unseen and hiding in plain sight, between the ability to see what others cannot and the ability to be attracted to what others are not - all deftly and lyrically explored. I'm halfway through my second read, and it is well worth the time and attention.
As any of my Goodreads followers know, I don't feel qualified to review poetry. Though I studied lit and have recently developed a real taste for contemporary poetry, I don't have the language to critique. I can only say that this collection overflows with a beautiful, painful immersion in... not so much pain as the critique of pain. Though the pain is visceral and far from detached, it is always filtered through the mesh of meaning. We can't get to the why of the abuser - whether a parent, the government, a lover - but that doesn't mean we don't look for meaning in the abuse, and patterns, and connections.
The connections between physical abuse and fear of difference, between war and chemical castration, between *gross indecency* laws and domestic abuse, between discovering the unseen and hiding in plain sight, between the ability to see what others cannot and the ability to be attracted to what others are not - all deftly and lyrically explored. I'm halfway through my second read, and it is well worth the time and attention.
November 27, 2022
A visceral, memorable book of poems written by a wonderful human I've been lucky enough to write with via a handful of in-person and virtual poetry workshops in recent years.
Am I entirely biased about Toby being a brilliant writer [and teacher]? Yeah, probably.
Does it make it any less true? Not in the slighest.
I pre-ordered this beautiful book and I will pre-order every book Toby writes forever.
[Five stars for being a collection that immediately gained "perpetually lives next to my desk" status.]
Am I entirely biased about Toby being a brilliant writer [and teacher]? Yeah, probably.
Does it make it any less true? Not in the slighest.
I pre-ordered this beautiful book and I will pre-order every book Toby writes forever.
[Five stars for being a collection that immediately gained "perpetually lives next to my desk" status.]
September 6, 2021
I can’t stop thinking about certain moments from No Doubt I Will Return A Different Man. Wray doesn’t shy away from the beauty and pain of family, history, and queerness. Lyrical and beautifully written, intellectual, and haunting—I look forward to reading it again.
December 28, 2022
"My father was a man made miserable / by a more masterful son."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews