Nine Books About Your Life:

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Drew Pisarra, author of Periodic Boyfriends (Capturing Fire Press).

First Book
Everything changed for me once I’d experienced Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Up until then, I hadn’t read any queer lit. I mean, maybe I’d read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray but nothing that was so unapologetically, untragically gay or that refused to conform to the standards of polite society (a.k.a. straight society) or that presented men loving men – behind bars, no less – as a middle finger to the status quo. The first time I read that book, I was terrified. The second time, it made me rejoice. Although Our Lady of the Flowers is hardly the first book I’ve ever read, it sometimes registers as the first book I ever read that truly mattered.

Most Cherished Book
I actually don’t own that many books. I suppose my most cherished one currently is Robert Ferro’s The Others, an out-of-print novella that’s been hard to find. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Ferro was teaching on Long Island while I was an undergrad at Hofstra. But by the time I’d discovered his marvelous trilogy of novels – The Family of Max Desir, The Blue Star, and Second Son – he had died of AIDS-related complications. His first book, The Others, is by far his most poetic and, in truth, his least realized. Yet my small hardcover copy, with its scotch-taped dust jacket and fragile spine, relates equal parts magic and poignancy for me. What do you call nostalgia for something that might’ve been but never was?

Most Perplexing Book
One result of being a lifelong devotee of Gertrude Stein is that I’ve stopped thinking of “perplexing” as off-putting. As Stein herself asserts in Composition as Narration: “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.” In other words, what may initially seem incomprehensible – the world is round, for instance – can eventually seem totally obvious. Sometimes, I think what perplexes us is simply something that’s yet to become clear. Which brings me to Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably. While working the front desk at an eye clinic in my 20s, I read Stein’s plotless head-spinner and was thoroughly baffled and utterly bewitched. Could I read it again? I doubt it, but that hardly minimizes the internal impact that strange book made on my brain.

Life-changing Book
I’m going to go with bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and not simply because hooks opened my eyes to the interconnectivity of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia but because she also invited me to deeply engage with philosophy and social criticism, even though I’m not a degreed academic. That book really laid the foundation for my lifelong curiosity about the literature of ideas. I may not frequent college classrooms, but I still read Plato, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Cornell West, Confucius, Schopenhauer, and Iris Murdoch.

Most Underrated Book
Younghill Kang’s East Goes West was just some random, unknown Penguin Classic gathering dust on my boyfriend’s bookshelf when I first spotted it last year. Yet, Kang’s thoroughly enjoyable roman à clef is as sharp and savvy as the best of Somerset Maugham. A complex recounting of one Korean expatriate’s life in early 20th century America, this fictionalized memoir feels as relevant as ever. That its editor, the famed Maxwell Parrish, wanted its protagonist to marry the central love interest – clearly a lesbian! – only strengthens my admiration for Kang, who refused to bow to such misguided suggestions.

A Surprising Book
I’m addicted to writing sonnets, but the truth is I appreciate many poetic forms. And that includes the limerick. Last fall, during my volunteer shift at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division (the bookstore at LGBT Community Center here in NYC), I chanced upon Sloppi Chulo’s deliciously raunchy collection of limericks, There Once Was a Muse.  Alternating nude portraits of Chulo (by various artists) with the author’s own wittily executed verses, this lovely booklet is as humorous as it is homoerotic. Whether you keep it on the coffee table or stash it in the bathroom is totally up to you.

Your Most Recent Book
Periodic Boyfriends is very much a sequel to my first poetry book, Infinity Standing Up. But whereas the earlier sonnet cycle recounts one misguided love affair, my newer collection details my intimate relationships with over 118 men, each man paired up with a different element from the periodic table. I confess I had to give myself a crash course in chemistry in order to create the connections. What the hell is actinium? Or iridium? Or yttrium? Well, now I know… a little bit. And in the process, I learned that everything and everyone comes with a rich backstory. Anything and anyone might serve as a muse.

Your Next Book
The poems in Fassbinder (working title) are inspired by the wildly assorted output of its namesake German filmmaker, R.W. Fassbinder – even work of his I’ve never seen. One poem references his lost short film “This Night”; another two, his unfinished screenplays for Rosa L. and Kokaine, respectively. I even drew on scripts he wrote for the theater, like Blood on the Cat’s Neck and Pre Paradise Sorry Now and his TV miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day and Berlin Alexanderplatz. None of my poems require a familiarity with his movies. All hope to inspire a curiosity about his genius.

Plug a Book
Is Regie Cabico the love child of Frank O’Hara and Federico García Lorca? It seems more likely that he’d be the offspring of a hot gay literary throuple who, after a particularly memorable night of chasing the rhythm (both on and off the page), find themselves in the presence of a newly hatched brunch poet, ready to serve them champagne flutes of expertly crafted verse and a tray of bon mots. I imagine Cabico arriving fresh yet fully formed – like Athena. But this time, instead of the head and the thigh, his birth is beholden to the heart and the funny bone. You’ll find his spirit in full display via A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex, his debut collection of poetry. A seminal figure in NYC’s slam poetry scene, Cabico here proves his work is as powerful on the page as on the stage… no small accomplishment considering his high-wattage charisma.