Lavender Silk

Author: Lonely Christopher

Publisher: Spiral Editions (2023)

This is a multifaceted approach—lyrical, language-forward, narrative, conceptual, and confessional—to sussing out and reckoning with construction(s) of a midcentury queer identity. The speaker of these poems is half lodged in the world of Grindr and half lodged in the bygone world of Alvin Baltrop's piers. Using historical accounts, art history, New York City lore, and an assertive, uneasy, at times sardonic and at times hilarious flex of wit, street smarts, emotional gravity, and assurance, the reader is presented with a complicated bricolage of queerness, of self, of society.