He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices (Lambda Literary Award - Gay Poetry)

I would like to add my voice to the chorus of positive reviews. (Don't get the negative review. "Middle aged"? The author is 30.) Anyway, let's start with the title. It's an homage to the original title for T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which was "He Do the Policeman in Different Voices." (Tom! I didn't know you had it in you!) This collection has won the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, the most prestigious award for gay poetry. It deserves it. It is strong poetry, "full body contact" poetry. In his blog ([...]) the author modestly states that his work is about gender, sexuality and pop culture. And how. The thing that distinctly separates from the work is lesser talents is that he has taken all his training to heart: there is evidence of a substantial amount of critical reading of other poets here, and mastery of the elements of his craft through practice, practice, practice. I particularly appreciate the fact that he knows "which tool to use for which task." The episodic, descriptive narratives are comfortably adapted to long, ropey Whitman/Ginsberg type lines, and the intense focus of conversation and conflict are compressed into shorter, epigrammatic lines. Most of all, I appreciate his honesty. I appreciate the fact that there is no Victorian or academic escapism in evidence here. He reports life as he experiences it, or as his imagination reconceives it (in the series on a serial murderer). Above all, I appreciate honesty and respect from a writer for me as a reader, and Stephen Mills has both in spades.

This poetry collection told a wonderful story about the gay condition. I didn't give it 5 stars because I didn't want to be too generous.

Brutally, unflinchingly honest. These are the kind of poems you carry with you long after you put the book down.

Sibling Rivalry Press has given us a superb young poet who doesn't mince words about the ironies, frustrations and dangers of sex in America. And if we're dealing with gay sex, multiply those qualities tenfold. Stephen S. Mills is a 20-something poet with the soul (and writing ability) of a much older, wiser, more experienced one. The 28 poems in this collection capture 21st-Century males attempting to connect for sex (and perhaps, occasionally, even for love), and they show how the human species' search for sex partners is every bit as fraught with potential for disaster as the love-lives of every other animal species.Divided into three sections, Mills takes us from the general to the specific. His first section's 12 poems depict testosterone-drenched, would-be rebels driven to touch and to be touched - some surviving their adolescence, some not. From sex education in the stifling schoolrooms of the American Mid-West, to capital punishment for enjoying sex in Iran, to the magnificent title poem of the book where we see the gay man in all his glorious complexity, Mills displays an artistry that is deceptively smooth, beautifully presented, and carefully crafted. His poems are forthright, clearly written, and emotionally complex. As an example, "The Ghost of Little Edie Beale Meets Me in a Gay Bar" is at first blush an easy read: a guy meets the ghost of a girl he knew back in his school days, and they chat before she leaves. But this poem rewards re-reading, for it's a carefully calculated, intricate weaving of the narrator's need for acceptance, his yearning for physical intimacy, and his recognition and resignation that we all stand as isolated emotionally from that intimacy as do the dead. And, ironically, the narrator gets more sympathy and acceptance from an innocent, shy, lovely dead girl than he does from the bar packed with self-defeating misfits. You've GOT to buy the book just to read this fine poem!But the heart of this collection is the one powerful poem that makes up the entire second section: "An Experiment in How to Become Someone Else Who Isn't Moving Anymore." There's no way of knowing how sex will go. Will we be attractive to someone? Who will take the lead in bed? After sex, what will we do? Will we want to meet again? Will the leaving be awkward? This wonderful joy-ride of a poem poses and - in uncomfortable ways - answers these questions through the narrator's exploits as he tries to find sexual fulfillment with brief encounters, finally rubbing mental shoulders (and other body parts) with a handsome, well-mannered, well-built stud - Jeffrey Dahmer. Read this poem before your next one-night stand.The 15 poems of the final section are more personal and introspective as the narrator tries to come to terms with his feelings about wanting sex with a porn star imprisoned for murder. And the poems are not quirky or kinky - or at least no more so than the workings of the reader's own suppressed libido.What was it that Emerson wrote to Whitman after receiving a copy of "Leaves of Grass'? "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." I hope some current-day eminent critic is astute enough to send the same sort of encouragement to the splendid Stephen Mills.

Reading this collection of poems HE DO THE GAY MAN IN DIFFERENT VOICES serves to introduce many readers to the power of the young intensely talented Stephen S. Mills. His style of writing, visually, looking at the pages of his poems that tend to be quite long, appears more like pages from a scrapbook or notebook, so dense is the content while so accessible is his technique of placing his words/thoughts/experiences/fantasies before us.To get a bit of history out of the way: `Stephen S. Mills has an MFA from Florida State University. His poems have appeared in The Gay and Lesbian Review, PANK Literary Magazine, Velvet Mafia, The New York Quarterly, The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Ganymede, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, Assaracus, and others. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award. He currently lives in Orlando, FL with his partner and his dog.' And having that on the table, there is a bit of an interview with poet Jory Mickelson, Mills shared something that deserves quoting: `As a lover of literature, there have been countless poems, stories, and novels I've read that have completely changed me and my outlook on life. In my poetry, I attempt to shed light on many issues people are very uncomfortable with. By doing that, I know many will turn away from my work and not accept it or value it, but I also know there are people out there wanting and needing poems like mine. In many ways, I try to write the poems I wish I could have read as a younger man coming to terms with being gay.'But now for his poems. Mills is able to take us with him to the most bizarre frames of mind and places where he has either experienced moments of bliss or moments of wonder or of horror that he releases on the page with such fluidity that they become not only tolerable but enormously engrossing. His is a mind suffused with the history of literature and poetry and he uses those touchstones to bring us the most startling erotic, at times voyeuristic transports, while at other times demanding of us that we stare into the mirror of media assault he pushes toward our eyes and minds.In his extended poem that bears the title of this book, he is parodying TS Eliot's poem `The Waste Land', the original title of which, according to Mills, was `He do the Police in Different Voices' : this long poem traverses the life of the poet and excursions into other milieus and yet after all the strangely humorous moments he ends this reflective journey with the following:VIIIt's Christmas.The tree is trimmed with silver balls,Red tinsel, a crooked angel.There's a fire crackling.It smells of cinnamon and pine needles.He stands before the tree naked.In his forties.His ass is just beginning to lose its battle with gravity.Winter light is flooding the room.The year is ending.Time is rushing by, yet everything feels so slow.Like this tree that is growing brittle,Sucking water form a try below.This tree is holding on to life,Yet knows it's all about to end.In a week's time, it will be bare, needleless,And on the corner waiting for the garbage truckTo rumble down the city street in the coldOf a January morning.No, this is not indicative of the contents of this book of poems, but it is one of the few that can be shared in a review! The rest of the poems deal with the agony of seeing death, sex education, dalliances in bed/accompanied, one called `My Boyfriend Tells My Parents I'm Writing to a Gay Porn Star in Prison', `Imagining You in a Prison Photograph', and one of the most powerful ones - `Iranian Boys Hanged for Sodomy, July 2005.' Mills is simply not afraid to go anywhere his burgeoning imagination takes him. He writes about gay life as well as anyone writing today. In his long poem `An Experiment in How to Become Someone Else Who Isn't Moving Anymore' he traipses through race, sadism, Jeffrey Dahmer and ends it with 'November can be a quiet month./ The birds head South. The leaves/ pile at the end of Midwestern/ driveways, where boys run in woods./ Boys who don't understand/ the fascination they have with death,/ with everything in life that moves/ and then, eventually, stops.'Stephen S. Mills is exploding with talent and has the courage to tell us the dark interstices of his mind. He is an extremely important new voice - a bit scary, but very real. He is addicting. Grady Harp, February 12