DEATH & DISASTER SERIES
by Lonely Christopher
Lonely Christopher’s debut poetry collection was a controversial cris de coeur that attracted scorn and praise on its initial release for an unsparing portrayal of a young alcoholic gay writer struggling to find meaning in the loss of his mother to cancer. Inspired by Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses,” Christopher embraces an enfant terrible persona, unafraid of raw emotions, scrawling intense and devastating lyrics that push verse to its breaking point. In a combination of experimental and confessional modes, using a complex array of styles, personal bereavement is trapped between penury and hatred of capitalism. This notorious volume has been acclaimed as a contemporary classic of the queer avant-garde.
This Roof edition features a new afterword by the author. The poems have been corrected and revised to create a definitive text.
People are saying:
“Lonely Christopher’s work depicts a prickly, dangerous, upsetting world that somehow reveals the unthinkably awful without making it palatable. He shows that one does not have to sacrifice the beauty of visionary difference to the mediocrity of shared queer commonality forged by social networks.”
– Felix Bernstein, The Boston Review
“HOW TO SAY HOW essential this writer Lonely Christopher is for our lives!? It’s all between the words, this pressure he builds behind the eyes. Stand anywhere you want with this book inside our headache age of information fatigue.”
– CA Conrad
“Aesthetically and polemically these poems heft joy and grief and fury. Politics, romance, wonder suffuse them. Lonely Christopher is a fearless poet par excellence. ‘I am the star of my own truncated privacy’ says the poet. What choice do we have but to heed his appeal: ‘Do not face eternity with your brain.’”
– Uche Nduka
“Lonely Christopher refuses to flatten anything; in his tumbling poems, reality is allowed its full difficulty, pain, and ugliness. He bears witness to the hair loss and blood coughed up, to the death that keeps reoccurring in poem after poem, and to the petulance of desire and consumption, without excusing the reader from shouldering a share of that burden. We have to look at what we’re carrying.”
– Jameson Fitzpatrick, Lambda Literary
“This book takes the idea of a dark destiny of being and throws a ton of black clouds on it and black paint on top of that and then makes it into a book of really really pretty songs that break my heart and head open again and again with Plath’s blood jet, the dialectic of Tsvetaeva, and Stein’s thump, all wrapped up in the sad birds of Yeats. Everyone needs to read this one. Tell the poem ‘Black June’ that I sent you.”
– Dorothea Lasky
“I adore and am infected by the Mayakovskian reach and collapse of this, as well as by the Warholian money-logic: something is repeated and repeated but not diminished; something else is unfairly, irrevocably zero’d out; grief is turned into a kind of money, that is, into voice; an alternate economy is set up on fatal principles; a June that stays and is cruel. [...] In this Donne-like space, God and Poetry have the same shape—insatiable form—but it is also a ‘no form’, a ‘no justice’; this poet commits himself to live impossibly at, in, and as this membrane, this diaphragm, this limit. [...] The lushness of Lonely Christopher is a contradictory flora, both decorated and plain, but always intensely voiced, dramatic, forceful, and red-hued. [...] Death & Disaster Series will be a delight to his fans, a firm but loving scourge to his critics, and a bewitching new flavor for the vulnerable few who seek slim or thickish volumes to clutch to their slim or thickish breasts. Long may he wave.”
– Joyelle McSweeney, Fanzine
The Author:
Lonely Christopher is the author of the poetry collections The Resignation and In a January Would from Roof Books. He also wrote the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse and the novel THERE. He is the founding artistic director of Inter Poets Theater and his plays have been presented in Canada, China, and the United States. His film credits include several international shorts and the feature MOM, which he wrote and directed. He lives in Brooklyn with his spouse, the poet Venn Daniel.