☀ What Sparks Poetry: Readers Write Back

Today's Headline: "Here’s the Shortlist for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize."

April 30, 2025 To conclude National Poetry Month, we bring you a special Wednesday edition of What Sparks Poetry, our series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series, Readers Write Back, we asked our readers which poem, of all those we’ve published in our last seven years, has moved them most. Erotic Crime Thriller James Allen Hall Cruising (1980) It's just a flimsy mattress in a hookup motel, a night when the moon is a single stud in a leather sky. Just a bed smelling of spilled poppers, until two men enter. Then it's a story: one lays himself naked, face-down, offering his wrists, ankles to be rope-knotted, the thrill of seeing what exists after extremity. The movie's first image: a hand floating in a helpless river, cross-fading into a couple of male cops forcing two queer sex workers, their painted mouths. All sex is a body trying to tell a story with a hand over its mouth. Because this is erotic crime, what follows are hours of leather bar dancing, the ball-sweat skulking off the celluloid, and plenty of interrogation. The killer spreads like a plague— first one nondescript actor plays him, then another, until the undercover cop catches the serial virus, this being 1980, the end of innocent beds, of innocuous jocks, foam parties, condomless trade. As if the director— in conjuring the end of taboo in strobe light, in dim urinals, in park bushes, under the spinning doom of moon— in trying to make us subject has subjected us to ravage instead. My friend says I'm dramatic, says you can't blame art for epidemiology. Forgive me. I have come here to the river, to the bed, to the foaming edge of time, to 1980, a year before the first reported cases. I have come with my one good hand and all my blood and I will say anything to save us. from the book ROMANTIC COMEDY / Four Way Books READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward What Sparks Poetry: Readers Write Back "'All sex is a body trying / to tell a story with a hand / over its mouth,' James Allen Hall writes in 'Erotic Crime Thriller.' That is the crux of the poem for me, and points to all the questions it poses. Like, what does sex mean, between any two bodies? When it’s illicit? What does sex mean when your body, or the body of the person you’re with, could be the site of, a spreader of disease? What does a body mean when all the sex it has is considered illicit; when its very desire is seen as a disease? And what does a movie mean when it tells us the story of a time just before a tragedy? In watching it after the fact, is it possible to just appreciate the film for what it is, or will we inevitably look for signs of what’s to come? Will we inevitably wish we could go back in time to the world of the film and change it somehow, and therefore save the real world, the one we live in, from what hadn’t yet happened? The body of this poem comes to you, smelling of sweat and leather, and it may have a hand over its mouth but it still asks these questions, tells these stories, and demands the reader listen." Jessie Lynn McMains READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE "Here’s the Shortlist for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize." The following collections have been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize: The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman (The University of Chicago Press), Kiss the Eyes of Peace by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Brian Henry (Milkweed Editions), Psyche Running by Durs Grünbein, translated by Karen Leeder (Seagull Books, Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press). via LITERARY HUB READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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