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Winner of the 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Publishing Triangle
The poems are truthful, snappy, plenty of low life & local detail, sparky mind of the young poet sassing & observing his environment, gay & grim, still romantic. Who doesn’t love romance? Lots of intelligence in the line, mindful measure of spoken speech music. —Allen Ginsberg
This collection of plainspoken, verbal snapshots suggests an autobiographical photo album. Here is one gay man’s life: memories of high school, all kinds of lust, domestic love, the company of pets, the pleasures of music, books and movies, as well as anger, grief, illness and death. Walta Borawski could be as witty and sly as Frank O’Hara, but he was wiser, more passionate, naked and liberated.The poems he left behind are a gift. Philip Clark and Michael Bronski have done an invaluable job bringing his work together and sharing it with us. —Christopher Bram, author ofEminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Walta Borawski (1947 – 1994) was a well-known and widely published poet active in the Boston and national poetry scenes during the post-Stonewall era. He worked with radical political newspapers and collectives such as Fag Rag and Gay Community News. His first collection of poetry, Sexually Dangerous Poet (1984), was published by the Good Gay Poets collective, while his second, Lingering in a Silk Shirt (1994), appeared from Fag Rag Books. Posthumously, his work has appeared in multiple publications, including The James White Review, which included a feature on Borawski in its Summer 2001 issue and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (2009), edited by Philip Clark and David Groff.
Borawski’s poems range from searing political commentary concerning the history and social status of gay men to sharp, witty and steadfastly defiant work on love and death during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski is the inaugural title of the Rebel Satori Imprint The Library of Homosexual Congress, dedicated to preserving and promoting provocative works of gay literature, with a focus on the AIDS crisis.
Edited by Philip Clark & Michael Bronski
Paperback, Published 2022, 252 pages