Connor and Seal

Inspired by Rita Dove's groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a masterful queering of poetic lineage. With oracular grace and whimsy, these poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, "the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the...
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Inspired by Rita Dove's groundbreaking Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a masterful queering of poetic lineage. With oracular grace and whimsy, these poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, "the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the sky." Connor & Seal serves as almanac to a future ruck with technoqueer boy bots, cruising, and a grim coterie of state-sponsored violence. With imaginative dexterity and stylistic flexibility, each poem in Connor & Seal becomes a cipher of the labor of tomorrow's construction: "a bench where two old faggots had to stop," an emblem of a future history, "as quiet as the siren / is alarming."