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In The God of San Francisco, James J. Siegel examines queer grief during the onset of the AIDS crisis through a lavender-and-leather pantheon: St. Christopher, Allah, and the God of San Francisco transubstantiate a sarcoma's cicatrix into sequins, a viral dowry into a benevolent plume of dazzling feathers. From Laramie, Wyoming, to Toledo, Ohio, Siegel performs a magisterial frilling of historical attention, always emerging as "an extraordinary conflagration. A beautiful immolation." At once an elegiac columbarium and search-and-rescue map for future bliss, The God of San Francisco trills from the Castro Funeral Home to North Beach and back, surmising death as something honeyed and lissome, "eulogies eulogized." Desire masquerades as "a raven gliding / on the backdrop of midnight" and "Jesus in fishnets, / crossdressing his way through Nazareth," and desire cedes each poem's boy, spectral or otherwise, a warm hand, green grass, "the sun's rays on our skin."
About the author
James J. Siegel is a San Francisco-based poet and literary arts organizer.
He is the host and curator of the popular monthly Literary Speakeasy
show at Martuni's piano bar. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, his first
poetry collection, How Ghosts Travel, was inspired and fueled by his
coming of age in the Midwest. He was a scholarship recipient to the
Antioch Writers' Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and his poems have
been featured in a number of journals including The Cortland Review,
Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Assaracus, The Fourth River, HIV
Here & Now, The Good Men Project, and more. He was also featured
in the anthology Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men On Their Muses.
