Grant Chemidlin

Thank you Central Avenue Publishing for the chance to read and review this collection!

The Homosexual Agenda and Reflex are easily my favourite poems in this collection by Grant Chemidlin. After all, love, is political, it cannot be anything but. Whether you’re a brown woman desperate for the right to choose a partner and have privacy with said partner, a Black woman trying to keep her partner out of the prison-industrial complex, or a queer person simply wanting to love and marry without show more risking their life; desire is inseparable from politics.

Which is to say that even a collection that claims to be unabashedly joyous is steeped in anxiety. You don’t sense that anxiety immediately; ‘The Beginning of Love’, the first poem of the book features cotton candy clouds.

"How did you do that? I said.
I don’t know, he said. I was just hungry."

This hunger that stems from joy and desire is a palpable force in the collection; all that you can do when you just don’t need to think about the queerness of it all. That this love needs to “hide behind/ the bushes. The trees,/ who see no deviance, offer/ their trunks for cover.”

‘Dark Sunday’ that ends the collection is also a great example of moments of uncertainty.

"I pull your body over me
like a roof, mistake

your drumming heart
for rain."

For a moment, and just a moment, on this rainy Sunday, is the mistake the chosen lover?

Other pieces that stood out to me were ‘The Prayers of Mice’ and ‘In the Hour of Want’; animals and the elements of nature trying fruitlessly to bring you closer to happiness.

And yet, Grant Chemidlin, could have also allowed this collection some more time to develop. Poems like “The Mysterious Missing Story” are good conceptually, but slightly cheesy. They’ll do very well on insta, which isn’t an insult, but they don’t make sense for the book the poet is trying to publish. Because of course, instagram and tiktok are what got the author here; so how much can they deviate from the style that got them here? You just have to take a look at the marketing plan on NetGalley!

My other main criticism of this book is that I’m not sure how inventive this collection is; does removing the letters f, a, and, g from all the poems titled “F A G” really make it different or just hard to read when you’d get the same impact while just greying them out slightly? Especially when some of the other poems do just the same.

Which is not to say that the collection doesn’t work; I am leaving it 3.5 stars. It works best when Grant Chemidlin leaves insta and TikTok behind to product mature, authentic pieces; works that are full of hunger, where joy and love, even with the politics that accompany them, are enough. show less

I was pleasantly surprised with this one. This was so much better than Rupi Kaur (as I loathe few other things as much as the overhyped and vapid words which she publishes). I found myself shedding more than one tear (which once again, isn't saying much as poetry frequently makes me cry). I really liked this book, especially the coming out and self discovery aspects coupled with its down-to-earth and contemporary tone which made it easy to draw parallels Chemidlin's insights and my show more day-to-day life. show less

This collection of poetry was uniquely beautiful, full of remarkable lines that make you pause and think and then wish had thought of yourself. I found something to like or appreciate in every poem and several of them were extremely incisive and relatable. I found that I liked the poems earlier in the book better than those towards the end, but I think that’s just a matter of preference. In particular, “To the Popular Kids Who Called Me Gay”, “The Plea”, and “The Stoner show more Safari”, were utterly heartbreaking and completely compelling. I would be very interested to read anything else this author creates. show less