Cover art by: Cyrus Finegan

If Bacchus could text the nights of excess into a chart of enlightened revelry, that time machine would be a poet named Boston Gordon, who declares, "I am the hidden parts in a machine." Here is poetry eavesdropping on yourself, your past, your shiny future of the life you get to live. This book is queer gusto in a world that barely deserves what we have to offer. Gordon is great!

—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

If texting is a supreme form of secret messaging, how doubly lucky we are to be privy to the new poems/texts of Boston Gordon. We enter this world with “so many songs at Frank’s tonight/ruined my life”, reminding us that ruination and ecstasy are bosom buddies, two sides of the same queer coin. Loose Bricks is a bliss for all of us “to hear a freight train as I lay in bed at night./ in that old miserable apartment/where I don’t miss you.” Despite ourselves, on different days, “Loving is like/being alone.” 

If poetry is, at its hot heart, about unanswerable questions, the subject/object must loom large among those queries. Who do we write to, who do we text, what is secrecy, what ruins our lives, and what merely offers us redemption? Texting as poetic form merges the art of the epistle with the art of the footnote with the art of the sharply-indrawn breath; through texting-as-poem, a poet can admonish themself — “write about darts”—, can try and try again “it began with a whistle”  “A note to J for when they are sober”, can fantasize about spitting in someone’s mouth, can revel in the “deliciousness of new love”. This new book is all of these things, and as a reader, I am complicit and honored to be so. Loose Bricks is a revelation.

—July Westhale, author of Via Negativa and moon moon

Boston Gordon (he/they) is a poet from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the chapbook Glory Holes (Harbor Editions, 2022). He runs the award-winning You Can't Kill A Poet reading series—which highlights queer and trans identified writers in Philadelphia. He has poems published in many places like Guernica, American Poetry Review, and Best New Poets.