[04/30/24] Gellman, Matthew: Beforelight

BOA Editions Ltd., paperback

Publication Date: April 30, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. The speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of ruptured relationships and trauma on his nascent identity. These poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative relationships--familial, communal and ancestral--as the speaker searches for a communion with himself that his childhood deprived him of. Again and again, the speaker must hide his authentic forms of self-expression due to the pressures of the closet, and as a result is forced to navigate the thrills and fears of secret desire and discover, ultimately, how not to "make a life out of pain." Grounded, lyrical, tender and deeply psychological, the poems in Beforelight lay bare the search for self that, while difficult, provides its own reward for the searching and vulnerable speaker in these poems.