The chapbook is both a dirge and an exhalation. The poems are wrought with grief over the ravages of the AIDs epidemic\u2014both the 636,000+ lives lost to death and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more destroyed by social, political, religious, and medical stigma and bigotry. The poems are also a celebration of how queer intimacy has survived and thrived. There is delight and recognition of history in the line, \u201cBecause we live\/\/ in the easy century,\/ today we say\/ our wedding vows.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the Time of PrEP<\/em>\u00a0seamlessly marries biblical references with current cultural touchstones and literary moments, and it puts the queer side of all three at the forefront.\u00a0The healing pool of Bethesda is \u201cthrashed & cut\/\/ through like a sash\/ by a man standing\/ naked in the center.\u201d The 1990 photograph of David Kirby dying and his father is an \u201cOhio\/ Piet\u00e0.\u201d Dickinson\u2019s Death horse \u201cblazed\/ through here & did not stop for me,\u201d and the speaker admitting, \u201cI was careless, yes, & spared.\u201d There is lust and sex here, as in a great majority of literature. There is no blame in the poem \u201cThe Fall\u201d for Eve or the younger hookup because \u201cI want what\/ everyone wants,\u201d and \u201cThere is no deep enough.\u201d We want, we need, to be vulnerable with people\u2014physically and emotionally, with our partners and our society. We need deep connections.<\/p>\n Veiling over the poems is a fog\u2014both the literal fog around volcanoes, which causes the Brocken specter phenomenon and shrouds wedding nights, and the figurative fog of the fear of the AIDS epidemic, still hazing our skies today. Through both, Grace Cathedral \u201cmust\/ have looked, as it still looks, coming out\u201d gloriously every morning in San Francisco. Rancourt\u2019s images are precisely wrought and beautiful, and they do a graceful job of incorporating lust and sexual language without diminishing their rawness or going for shock value. Like in the bathhouse, \u201cwhere the jizz drifting like smoke\/ through the Jacuzzi is holy.\u201d<\/p>\n Rancourt is also deliberate in regenerating the Christian God of his youth \u201cthat smote, in a battle over\/ morality\u201d into a spirituality that celebrates queerness and humanity. The speaker is not going to sculpt a votive like the people of Florence who commissioned Ghiberti to sculpt doors \u201cas a way to say\u00a0Thanks be to God<\/em>\/\u00a0we made it out almost alive, only splintered,<\/em>\/\u00a0only for a brief time gutted<\/em>.\u201d Instead, here is \u201canother queer couple\/\/ making out on a bench & some days\/ it seems we\u2019ve found it\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a holy city\/\/ swollen with light & sound.\u201d However, he is celebrating that he and his husband are no longer plagued by fear: \u201chad we been\/\/ born twenty years\/ back, we might be\/ counted among\/\/ the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n Rancourt highlights how far queer people\u2019s rights and society has come, but also shows us how much further we still have to go. Although there are few young men \u201cacross the street hobbling\/\/ with a cane and pink bathrobe\u201d today, the speaker and we must follow the command in the poem \u201cLot\u2019s Wife\u201d to \u201clook now, back to where\/ your people are dying.\/\/ You, most of all,\/ must look.\u201d Because there is no guarantee that this forward momentum will continue in the future; in fact, Rancourt\u2019s speaker declares that \u201cI know it won\u2019t last\u201d because \u201cI\u2019ve read\/\/ every myth.\u201d We will slip back if queer people do not stay vigilant and the general population turns apathetic. In a time when being queer is still a death sentence for many, and unfiltered, rapid-fire characters can re-chart politics, every piece of art that celebrates and reveres queerness is a prophylaxis against the disease of hate.<\/p>\n Review by Alicia Marie Brandewie We live in different worlds, and Jacques J. Rancourt\u2019s chapbook\u00a0In the Time of PrEP\u00a0(Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) swims through several of these worlds. In gay and queer worlds, PrEP is as well known as chemotherapy, yet for those outside of gay and queer world, PrEP is not. Rancourt foregrounds the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[57],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3SN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14929"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14961,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929\/revisions\/14961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2018\/07\/19123143\/in-the-time-of-prep.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAlicia Marie Brandewie<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"