Metronome

Comprising a decade of writing, James Loop’s debut collection chronicles an ordinary life in patriarchal time, its subjugation and inventive resistance. In conversation with classical and modern models—particularly the Latin lyric and twentieth-century queer literatures—Metronome sounds an arcade of voices whose multiplicity, deviance, and good (and bad) humor subtly subvert authority’s myths. Loop's poetry offers us much we find missing in contemporary culture—it is sensitive, generous, and frank, with itself and with the world. —HUW LEMMEY Metronome is alive to wit, the comedy of having a body, and the erotic life of language itself. The poems move with a rare tonal agility—by turns tender, caustic, devotional, and laugh-out-loud funny—where grief and pleasure are co-conspirators. What feels most bracing and most queer here is the way thought itself becomes erotic, how attention, memory, and intellect gleam as forms of intimacy. This is a book that insists thinking can be a mode of loving, and that lyric seriousness can still be mischievous, worldly, and alive. —STACY SZYMASZEK Metronome gives me all the feels. Drizzled throughout is the pastoral lyric in transit with wit, canny restraint, queered puns, and a self-love determined to make acquaintance with the likes of James Baldwin, Thomas Browne, and Yukio Mishima. This hopscotch of readied buttons tendered by limericks and epistolary offers more than patron saints in Palermo or New York. It presents a life lived and still living. —LATASHA N. NEVADA DIGGS A lover's complaint is rarely lodged with any hopes of winning recompense —in fact, its embrace of exposure almost certainly entails more suffering, which is to say more material for future complaint. Looping through this bad infinity feels so pleasurable, though, when the lover's tongue is by turns sharp, tender, masterful, disdainful of mastery, ready to “unstring the lute” and put “this mouth to its honest use.” It's Loop's submissive style that I have happily come to love, bratty and brash in its denunciation of grandiose bullshit. —VIOLET SPURLOCK