Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection, Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity.
“The truth no one wants to name,” writes bell hooks, “is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within.” These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. The book’s three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader’s diary, broken up by two interludes of “divinations” – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.
Arvustused
[ Ultra Blue is] a vision that disavows certainty and entitlement in favour of something more contingent and ambiguous but, also, possibly more worthwhile. That Shakespearean Rag The poems of Bezansons Ultra Blue speak with a slow and purposeful care, offering meditations on boys and childhood, fathers and sons. rob mclennans blog
GRAEME BEZANSON is a Nova Scotian writer who spent the past eleven years living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from The New School in New York City. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the US, and Europe, in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems.
