Gerard Wozek's poems are searching for a deeper sense of belonging, family, literary kinship, and the I am song of Whitman. His best work mines the imagery and memory of gay boyhood--the boy that somehow / made it to here -- through torment and bullying--and explores what it means to feel alone, queer, and a stranger, even to his adopted family. In other words, Wozek's new book takes part in the long, queer tradition of poetry as self-creation. What makes Wozek's poems so achingly beautiful is how genuinely and bravely he conducts the exploration of identity. And he even underscores why; Because I wanted a transformation: / the tearing open of the chrysalis, / a breaking open into fearlessness.
--Christopher Hennessy, author of Love in Idleness
There is a sense of deep reverence in Gerard Wozek's A LITTLE WOUNDED BUT ON FIRE. There is a respect for the past, in poems where the narrator recalls his oftentimes traumatic experiences as a misunderstood child and teenager. And there is an honoring of real faith, the kind of homegrown, patchwork beliefs that many queer people assemble out of longing and an urgent need to find order in our disordered universe. In Wozek's domain, a lineup of Christian saints stands next to the Buddha, who stands next to an assemblage of queer American martyrs. The poems in this collection move in unison and follow an atlas that takes the reader on a journey through the plain vistas of the Midwest, into the deeper mysteries of identity, adoption, and finally, unknowability, and leaves us, in the collection's final poem, with a recognition that what we truly want, what we need, we often must make ourselves: Mother to myself, I am fire contained in flesh, / taut muscle, unleashed libido. /I'm on a map forged with abandonments, self-deceptions. /I build my compass with poetry. / Words form my cloister, my handmade grotto. This is a beautiful, meditative book that takes on the challenge of a long, sustained look at a poet's life, what he does to build it, to protect it, and ultimately, to acknowledge its ephemeral nature.
--William Reichard, author of The Night Horse: New and Selected Poems, and Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity
These poems are made of bread and ecstasy, earth and cloud, boy and saint. They are so beautiful; I can barely take them in without bursting. (In your mind, you sang to them, and your voice filled them with light.--the poet on boys who persecuted him as a child.) Combine Wozek's gorgeous language with his moving narratives, both his own and others'- from childhood to the present, and you'll have tapped the genius in these poems. The light that Gerard Wozek generously provides and provokes in his queer and mighty and mightily queer work, A LITTLE WOUNDED BUT ON FIRE, is a gift in which love, in all its physical and spiritual manifestations, always shines through.
--Maureen Seaton, author of Sweet World
Poetry.
