13th Balloon image
13th Balloon image

13th Balloon

Books | Poetry / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss

Mark Bibbins
O, The Oprah Magazine, "42 Best LGBTQ Books of 2020" NPR's Favorite Books of 2020 In his fourth collection, 13th Balloon, Mark Bibbins turns his candid eye to the American AIDS crisis. With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred— amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, “For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say.” And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing—through both joy and grief—to wonder.
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Author
Mark Bibbins
Pages
91
Publisher
Copper Canyon Press
Published Date
2020-02-22
ISBN
1619322145 9781619322141

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