Brutal Companion is a haunting and visceral collection of poems that explores themes of identity, sexuality, loss, and personal transformation. Drawing from his own experiences as a gay man, the poet delves unflinchingly into memories of desire, trauma, and self-discovery against the backdrop of an often unforgiving world. From intimate encounters and dreamlike visions to searing societal critiques, the poems paint a complex portrait of navigating life at the margins. With lyrical intensity and vivid imagery, the collection probes the brutality and beauty found in relationships with lovers, friends, family, and the self. In elegies to lost loved ones, the poet grapples with grief while celebrating the enduring power of human connection. Interwoven throughout are keen observations of a natural world that is at turns comforting and alien, a mirror for the poet’s inner landscape. Deeply sensory and evocative, Brutal Companion is a fierce meditation on survival and a testament to poetry’s ability to wrest meaning and resilience from even the darkest places.
Brutal Companion, Ruben Quesada
$18.00
ISBN: 9781962131032
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 94
Published: 10/15/2024
Applicable bookseller/retail discount on bulk orders of 10+ copies automatically applied at checkout.
Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about the fact of longing: “You slowly fade/behind a sugar maple, branches like scarecrows waving goodbye.” And he manages this beauty with a poetry so pure I am always left gagging at even the slightest move and smallest decision in each line (for instance, “above the black milk of Lake Michigan”). These poems are a stunningly melancholic look at love and its eternality. —Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
Brutal Companion is an offering—both seductive and intoxicating, these poems form a timeline, a fragmented microcosm of the history of the world and a man in it. Voluptuous and visceral, Quesada captures, with such tenderness, the brutality of the world’s ability to knowingly and unknowingly harm itself, capturing both the temporary high and the lingering ache of it all. With precisions, Quesada’s pen distills the brokenness of the world and delivers to us a stillness where, in this “…orchard of undress… Humans are wonderous… (and) the sun is far from rising.” —Laurie Ann Guerrero, former Poet Laureate of the State of Texas
Ruben Quesada’s superb new book of poems, Brutal Companion, gives solace and lulls the loneliness he finds in the world. Like his forebear Fernando Pessoa, who called his poetry “a secret orchestra, Quesada writes: “the body is a charming instrument.” His score made from the body in equal measure with the soul, a body whose intimacy creates its own melody with staccato codas: “As a boy, I was unbearably uncomfortable/about my body and the men my mother dated/gave me erections.” No one said intimacy would be easy: it’s a risk, the book says page to page, a risk worth the taking. Desire, flat and sharp, makes the sweet tune I hummed long after I put down these frank and decorous poems. What brutal, vulnerable, beautiful music we have now: Brutal Companion, a companion to keep. —Spencer Reece, author of Acts
This is a book that does not flinch, that is unafraid to witness a world where a gay boy is hunted in the schoolyard and where loved ones pass. Yet Quesada’s gaze is one that rises up to exalt love and queerness and celebrate the erotic and moments of living before loss. With “the elegance of hoary grass, / the magnolia’s grace,” with dazzling language and a tender heart, this is a book I did not want to stop reading, and when I did, made me look at the world with more intention and care. —Paul Hlava Ceballos, author of [banana], National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry finalist
MY MOTHER IS A GARDEN
She plants razzleberry fringe flowers in the backyard
as the chartreuse golden feather fare well next door.
Before my birth, she is acquired by the United States—
coerced by the American zodiac dream, she fled to Los Angeles—
decades later, she still withholds from speaking English and
only fertile names of flowers have taken root. She is luminous.
Her hair, a blackish grey against the philodendron, parted
long. I lose her in the shade of overgrown impatiens hanging
onto the hillside behind the house. The horizon undulates with
barberry and nettles, deer grass waves of silver. Years have passed,
not speaking with my mother, but today, I surprise her with a visit.
In the glow of the window, I watch her tend to her roses and
notice that I have taken the shape of her hips.
RUBEN QUESADA is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. His collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, is the winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize.
