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Graeme Bezanson's debut collection, Monster Energy / Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity."The truth no one wants to name," writes bell hooks, "is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within." These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Emile. The book's three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader's diary, broken up by two interludes of "divinations" - sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk's Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment,
Monster Energy / Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.
About the author
GRAEME BEZANSON is a Nova Scotian writer currently living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from the New School in New York City, where he lived for ten years. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the US, and Europe, in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems.
