This collection of poetry engages deeply with the archive of HIV-AIDS, responding directly to the work of gay men who passed away or lived with HIV-AIDS, as a collective mourning. John Boannani's poetry mingles joy, sex, eroticism, mouths, and Provincetown's gay beaches in a lived remembrance of the ACT-UP archive, thwarted abecedarians and villanelles mingling with ekphrasitic writing at its best. Read this. Feel this. Know this. In your body. The shape of a history where people loved, despite, despite, despite.

I got this as an arc on Netgalley and it will come out in September. Beautiful poetry, both flowy and experimental and at times harsh. As a queer, I cannot stress the importance of this subject.

"retorovirology" is a chronicle and an elegiac-epic oral history of the AIDS pandemic and its memory. Bonanni's poems are polyphonic, diachronic, on (/for an) occasion form-breaking—lines that you can tumble down from like a flight of stairs, eyeballs making weak-kneed legs—and, occasionally, funny.
   I liked the joyous perversity of 'Bowers vs. Hardwick'; the poignaint pained reflection on (watching? listening to? consuming? being consumed in?) Derek Jarman's 1993 Blue, in 'Variations on a Theme in Blue: is it right, does it do art justice to be able to look away, to have vision at all, with anything but a wall-full of #1E2E8E.

This was both incredible and haunting, and each line feels like it echoes with the weight of the past, with the reminder that HIV/AIDS wasn't even that long ago but yet an entire generation was lost, and the reverbations of its effects today. There is such a deep, deep unfairness. I loved how the poet was able to capture so many different poetic forms, starting us out with a sonnet, playing around with the abecedarian, et cetera. The way that italicised lines offer a back and forth. How some poems are dedicated to a specific person in history, or to a moment, how all it built into the zeitgeist of that time. Really glad that it won the prize that it did and that this work can be recognised and that I can be sitting down to read it.