A Book Review by Reuben Gelley Newman
In 1993, the black gay HIV+ poet Melvin Dixon, in his speech “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” charged future generations, “by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” Jacques J. Rancourt’s chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) not only takes up that charge, describing a present both startlingly different and unnervingly similar to Dixon’s past, but takes us to a somewhere where Dixon, perhaps, could be listening. In this somewhere, Rancourt can title a poem “I Don’t Go to Gay Bars Anymore,” then continue: “someone tells me & sure enough / another boards up.” In this somewhere,
The speaker both wants to live in that precarious Jerusalem — Rancourt’s San Francisco — and prays, simply, to live and to be seen. But this “holy city / swollen with light & sound…won’t last,” and its danger resounds through Rancourt’s tender, precariously balanced poems.
The chapbook begins with the expansive “Love in the Time of PrEP” — a title echoing Gabriel García Marquez’s famous book — in which the speaker and his husband are haunted by a rainbow, a “broken spectre,” while climbing a volcano. Everything is refracted — space, time, history — and the poem transitions seamlessly between intimacy and reflection, ending with “two Berkeley freshmen” who
This poem is on one level a plea for remembrance, but it also values those freshmen’s naivety. The chapbook’s epigraph, from the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, reads: “My approach to hope…can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” Rancourt’s own “backward glance” links the boy’s foolishness with that of some gay men in the ’80s who contracted HIV. He sees, in the present, a world where those boys can act “as if none of this every happened”: a world both freer and scarier. And in the future, he envisions a world where, perhaps, remembrance of tragedy can foster greater appreciation of our relative freedom.
The chapbook’s cover, an untitled collage by the artist Barton Lidicé Beneš, depicts a little boy playing with HIV pills and birds — whose bodies are made of the pills — eating them. To me, this juxtaposition of pills and play evokes the freshmen’s naivety and recalls Dixon’s devastating quip: “As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddl, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.” Rancourt is not an “acronym queen” — though PrEP, as he notes, stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis, a pill taken daily to reduce the chances of HIV infection” — but there is play in his danger, and danger in his play.
Indeed, the sheer joy of Rancourt’s language and imagery shines through despite the constant threat of death. “The jizz drifts like smoke” through the “holy Jacuzzi” in “At the Place of Bathhouses,” but “what has happened before / will happen again—the fog belt will roll in with the chill / of the dead…” The incantatory “Litany” takes its wordplay seriously: every line begins with the words “One man,” yet midway through the poem we read how “One man slept with ten men & survived / Ten men slept with one man & died.” Instead of confronting a homophobe, the speaker of “The Counter-Protester in the City” leaves his wedding cake topper on a bench nearby, while his younger self
In the Time of PrEP comes on the heels of a very different book addressing HIV/AIDS in the present, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. For Smith, the “us” is more specific: black, queer, and HIV+. But the book rings with a similar yearning for utopia: “please, don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better” (“summer, somewhere”). These books — along with many, many more by queer writers of all colors and genders — answer Dixon, who ends his speech with a plea to support gay and lesbian publishing, because, he insists, “our voice is our weapon.” Rancourt’s voice, with its wide-ranging depiction of grief, love, and history, is not only a weapon but a medicine. In “The Fall,” there’s a boy who, during sex,
Imagine Dixon’s name spoken back into the past, echoing throughout the well of history. Imagine his name spoken into the future, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” where queer, HIV+ voices can thrive. I’ve only hinted at the importance of religion to Rancourt’s work, but perhaps we can think of his vision as, rather than mere “hope,” an act of faith. Though the litany of men Rancourt remembers remain chillingly nameless, he prays for them — and prays for a different future — despite their anonymity. In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.
In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.