D. A. Powell

D.A. Powell is a master of using overt sexuality to mask an even more masterful underlying subtext. It's amazing how someone can toy with language in such a way a refrain can seem present within a poem were words and phrases do not repeat. Coctails shows the mundane and shocking complexity of everyday for a gay man in a city of brick and blue collar. Whereas Tea was a eulogy, a book of AIDS and loss and the lives claimed, Coctails is its opposite, its Whitmanesque singing. His approach to show more the line as fresh as we've come to expect, a breath both extended and stuttered all at once. Powell is a poet of the body, both its gritty reality and its Platonic ideal. He juxtaposes the voice of the poem with outside voices, song lyrics, and the occasional clip from a John Waters film. Coctails becomes D.A. Powell's Song of Myself, the perfect end-stop to his trilogy in verse. show less

The books starts out with some interesting poems about the landscape of California, which I enjoyed, but then it turns into poem after poem about troubled gay sex encounters. Those poems tend to employ wordplay of the type I would expect from a snickering schoolboy. I imagine Mr. Powell laughing to himself at the inclusion of every double entendre, but I just found it more and more childish.

AN AMAZING BOOK.