A captivating collection, full of charged atmospherics, lyrical emotions, and searing imagery.
Living with Parkinson’s Disease, the nuances of urban gay life, and a bloody uprising of livestock against their human oppressors are among the subjects of these beguiling poems and stories.
Ballard, who blogs about his own Parkinson’s experiences, pens many sonnets and haiku about living with the ailment, offering a plangent but good-humored take on motion disorders (“A poppy’s petals / Gently fall to the soft earth. / Not me—I crash land”) and the limitations of the condition. Several short stories explore gay life in Manhattan. In “Invitations,” a narrator riding the subway is fondled—to his delight—by a younger man who then gives him an invitation to a sex club where he enjoys raunchy encounters but contracts a mild STD; months later he runs into the fondler again, who now regrets past excesses. In “Rufino,” a narrator falls in love with the title character, a Mexican American of Mayan ancestry, and wrestles with the conflicted legacy of Rufino’s Catholicism—both its homophobia and its tradition of caring for the persecuted. Ballard rounds out the collection with intriguing genre pieces. In the eerie “Weathered,” an American teacher in Asia notices an occult pattern playing out in a repeated, seemingly random confluence of bowls, swirling fluids, tunnels, and people shouting at him—which are always followed by devastating tropical storms. And in “The Turkey,” a serio-comic mashup of “The Raven” and Animal Farm, a young barnyard turkey learns of the approaching doomsday of Thanksgiving and leads the animals in revolt against Farmer Joe, wreaking havoc on humans and beasts alike and prompting bleak reflections on mortality. Ballard’s writing is infused with subtle, mysterious, open-ended meanings, but it’s always grounded in sharply observed, painfully intense physical specificity. (“I’m scared of choking,” he writes in the poem “Six Years with Parkinson’s Disease: Status Update.” “Every time I pour / A tall, cool glass of water, I’m afraid / The water will explode like a grenade.”) The result is a richly textured take on an illness and on other baffling complexities of life.
A captivating collection, full of charged atmospherics, lyrical emotions, and searing imagery.