Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781945588495)

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a police officer--the titular "man in blue"--becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: "It's a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I'm too ashamed to want for myself." In "Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum," the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an "infant's small mouth" as well as the "sad calculator" that was "built to subtract from and divide a town." In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the "other" and locates us squarely within these personae.

Author: Tommye Blount
ISBN-10: 1945588497
ISBN-13: 9781945588495
Publisher: Four Way Books
Language: English
Published: 03/02/2020
Pages: 152
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.90w x 0.60d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/15/2020 pg. 29
Publishers Weekly 04/20/2020