Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), the latest chapbook from Limp Wrist founder Dustin Brookshire, couples conversational narrative poems with casually surreal lyrics inspired as much by Desperate Housewives as by Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” 

These nineteen poems scoff at snotty distinctions separating the literati glitterati and popular culture. “Bad Fruit” improvises on Denise Duhamel, another poet very much at home in the weirdness of the quotidian. “I’m the apple whose seeds won’t bear fruit,” riffs the speaker, “which makes me as bad as gay can be.” In an era that coaxes LGBTQ subjects to endorse a flimsy “It gets better” ethos, these poems remind us that would-be clichés like “coming out” and “coming to terms with oneself” retain their melancholic power when parents still ask “What would your grandmother think?”

Offering a counterpoint to cameos by Dolly Parton, Teri Hatcher, and Janet Jackson—or, to be more precise, Janet’s Jackson’s “pierced nipple”—Brookshire invokes Anne Sexton, whose emboldening spirit presides over this suite of poems. Notorious for her furs, for her rock band, and for her stagey delivery, Sexton would admire the poet’s provocative tactics.  In “This Poem Wants to Be Censored,” the speaker glides from the confrontational (“This poem says strike a match to the page”) to the ominous  (“This poem is ready to blaze”) to the insouciant (“This poem loves to be dirty and true”). These poems traffic in—rather than shun—the slush and gloss of the everyday in order to honor queer culture and queer embodiment.

Ultimately, Love Most Of You Too urges us to eclipse our prejudices: “we’re capable of doing a 180 / when someone else has the balls / or brass ovaries to do what we dream of,” and Brookshire displays more than enough guts and grace to serve as our guide.

May, 2021