Book
Fantasia for the man in blue
Publication Information
Tribeca : Four Way Books, [2020]
Physical Description
8 unnumbered pages, 139 pages, 9 unnumbered pages ; 23 cm
Summary
"An examination of a brutal America through the voices of its most vulnerable sons. In his debut collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a police officer - the titular "man in blue" - becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous, erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: "It's a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I'm too ashamed to want for myself." In "Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum," the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepherd as an "infant's small mouth" as well as the "sad calculator" that was "built to subtract from and divide a town." In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the "other" and locates us squarely within these personae"--
Contents
- Fantasia for the Man in Blue
- I
- How Sweet this Great Land
- Americana Elegy
- My God, Lick Him Clean
- The Button
- The Purse Thieves
- Historical Site
- Late Show at the Americana
- Framing Debra Shaw
- Proscenium
- The Laugh
- Phonophobia
- At the Mercury Theater,
- Blood Harmony
- The Pool
- II
- Fantasia for the Man in Blue
- Leroy Auditions for the Fame School
- The Ballad of Bobby Blake
- Castro Supreme Finally Speaks
- Ode to Chub Porn
- Not an Elegy for Erik Rhodes
- Diesel Washington Demonstrates The Bully
- Thug on Thug
- Are you clean,
- Bareback Aubade with the Dog
- And the dog comes back
- The Runts
- Lycanthropy
- Palmer Park
- The bug
- Fable of the Beast
- Niggas' Revenge
- Arcane Torso on Grindr
- The Weather, the Weather
- What sort of bird
- III
- Fantasia for the Man in Blue
- Icarus Does the Dishes
- The Suit
- Geppetto's Lament
- Of a Wicked Boy
- Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum
- Of his daughter's hair,
- Portrait of My Father
- Leda
- Hardheaded Aubade
- The Bug Chaser
- The Singing Head of Orpheus
- Do you have anything
- IV
- Dear Latrice Royale
- The Lady Chablis as Herself
- Rest Stop in Rawsonville, Michigan
- The Hunger of Luther Vandross
- Luther Vandross Sings Bowie
- Luther Dreams of Aretha Franklin's Gown
- Bling Elegy
- Fantasia for the Man in Blue.