retrovirology
poems
by John Bonanni
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 15 2026 | Archive Date Jul 15 2026
Talking about this book? Use #retrovirology #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Conversing across generations, retrovirology draws from Queer lineage to unleash the wisdom of AIDS activism into our current political moment.
retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry Kramer and Gaëton Dugas, others operate as ekphrasis against the creative artwork of ACT UP’s direct actions.
Combining reinterpretations of formal elements such as the concrete poem, the abecedarian, and the villanelle, post-confessional poems converse with a docupoetic history through an arc that examines what it meant to grow up Queer as a child in rural Pennsylvania in the late ’80s and early ’90s, surrounded by messages of gay disease and the violence of its silences. retrovirology, then, resurrects Queer elders to allow memory to “rise from its subjugated state” (Jung) and to carry with it, into our futures, all of its wisdom and fire.
Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of AIDS Activism and History.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"retrovirology captures the urgency that few books contain: This book is a remembrance of those who passed away during the AIDS epidemic, but equally, it is an altar built to honor those Ancestors of that mournful time. And I say, now in this new year, in this new place—where some are trying to take us back to an old place—now is the time for urgency. Now is the time for those Ancestors’ wisdom. Now is the time to call their names: Larry Kramer and Gaëton Dugas. Now is the time to speak back against erasure. To reclaim this history. This crucial fierceness. Now: This remembrance that is painful but also beautiful. Now: A taking up space on the page and within the spirit. And I’m so grateful to have read this book—I’m so grateful that it chose me in this time."
-Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings and judge of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
"Committed to ‘remember what everyone wants to forget,’ retrovirology is stirring, persuasive proof that courage and outrage have mattered, and still can. The subjects here: intimacy and revolution, history and our rights, and equally, the slow burn of queer joy, the unstoppable fire of queer visibility. John Bonanni makes from that fire an essential music."
-Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North
Marketing Plan
Marketing Plans
- Galley mailing
- National print and online reviews and features
- Regional print and online reviews and features
- Targeted outreach to Alaskan interest media
- Select author appearances
- Online and social media promotion
- Feature at AWP 2025
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780822968351 |
| PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 112 |
Available on NetGalley
Views expressed in promotions/advertisements do not necessarily reflect those of NetGalley or its affiliates.
© 2026 NetGalley LLC
• All Rights Reserved
Views expressed in promotions/advertisements do not necessarily reflect those of NetGalley or its affiliates.