AEGiS-BKREV: Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990

Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990

Serpent's Tail/High Risk Books, 180 Varick St., 10th Fl, New York, NY 10014. 115p. ISBN 1-85242-407-9. $12.99.
by Tim Dlugos, edited by David Trinidad, introduction by Dennis Cooper. 1996.

Tim Dlugos is one of the post-New York school poets. This small book is a retrospective selection of his works, including those poems he wrote about AIDS. Unfortunately he died of AIDS while writing these poems and his friend David Trinidad edited the manuscripts for publication. There are 23 poems from 1973-1981, 14 from 1982-1986, and 14 from 1988-1990. Dlugos died in 1990 after living a very active, fast, and full life. "To be his friend was to be guided through otherwise inaccessible, and in some cases seemingly conflicting worlds. One was always trailing after Tim as he flew between cocktail parties, poetry readings, art openings, baths, services at his local church, and elsewhere, often over the course of a single evening." His poems cover four phases: early years were gentle, clever, and melancholic; the second phase was more physically enigmatic and complicatedly lyrical; the third was during a period of heavy drinking and on and off depression; and the last was a period when he tested positive for HIV and found his first stable love.

His poems have feeling, life, joy, sadness, and everything else in between. From "Parachute" he writes: "....But when I think of how AIDS kills my friends, especially the ones whose paths through life have least prepared them to resist the monster, I think of an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink that sticks to every living branch or flower its rank fur brushes as it stalks its prey...Dwight the dancer, Dwight the fashion illustrator and the fashion plate, Dwight the child, the borderline transvestite, Dwight the frightened, infuriating me because an anti-AZT diatribe by some eccentric in a rag convinced him not to take the pills with which he might still be alive...But when I see Dwight smile and hear his fey delighted voice inside my head, I know AIDS is no chess game but a hunt, and there is no way of escaping the bloody horror of the kill, no way to bail out, no bright parachute beside my bed." This is a must book for all public and academic libraries. How vicious this disease is to take such talent away from us.

Keywords: Poems

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