Inheritance [Paperback]

Steven Reigns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2010

Steven Reigns poetry offers a gay life lived with pleasure and bitterness and companionability. As National Book Award winning American poet and memoirist Mark Doty so eloquently states: "To read this book is to meet a man alert to his times and the textures of the lives around him, a community observed with tenderness, wit and pleasure."

Editorial Reviews

Review

Steven Reigns explores the inexhaustible power of family to affect our lives and loves, and does so in a candid yet passionate manner remarkable for its evocative and wounding moments. --Wanda Coleman, author of Heavy Daughter Blues and Mercurochrome: New Poems

Steven Reigns' Inheritance sizzles with the unsparing heat of memory. This impressive and soulful collection displays a queer poetics so precise and deft it leaves the reader almost singed by how close to the mark the words flare. --Tim Miller, author of Body Blows and 1001 Beds

About the Author

Steven Reigns's poetry and fiction create an emotional landscape few writers explore. The writings are an open expedition into our feelings and senses. Reigns has an ability to reflect with unbridled honesty upon experiences and craft them into art. In his debut collection, Your Dead Body Is My Welcome Mat, Reigns confronted abuses of power and living life in the margin. An out gay activist and survivor of abuse, Reigns has taught creative writing workshops around the country to gay youth groups and people living with AIDS. Reigns currently resides in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 90 pages
• Publisher: Lethe Press (May 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590211383
• ISBN-13: 978-1590211380
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,879,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful!, May 5, 2010

By 

Juliette Aiyana "Juliette Aiyana" (Planet Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inheritance (Paperback)

Steven Reigns does it again, but even more authentically, and more raw in his new title, Inheritance. Don't read this fantastic book of poems if you don't want your world rocked. Reigns will get you to see through his eyes, and he will get you to feel through his heart. He writes about what he has inherited from his family, friends and strangers, about what other people in his life have inherited from the same, and about what he would like to inherit from others. At times, he seems to have more compassion for others than for himself. His poetry demonstrates why he feels so deeply compassionate for others such as in the poem, "Debbie May", and "Josh" and for those whom he met for a moment such as in "Stolen" (which made me cry). Reigns tells straight-up upsetting truths about his parents. He beautifully and eloquently explores new relationship curiosity in "6th Date". And, with great humor he writes about the good that came of his being forced to play baseball in "Bottle Tosser". If you have missed Reigns other work, this is a great place to start!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unflinching Look at Family Dynamics and Developing Self-Realization, July 7, 2011

By 

Rob Jacques "Technical Writer" (Puget Sound) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Inheritance (Paperback)

My comments are based on an earlier version of "Inheritance" now out of print, but thankfully Sibling Rivalry Press, a new and highly energetic force that has stormed onto the poetry publishing scene with gusto, has brought out a new edition. And that's a welcome event because this well-wrought work deserves to remain in print for a long, long time.

The poems in "Inheritance" are like personal letters to you from a friend about whom you've been concerned. The poems are triumphs of the English declarative sentence: plain-spoken narrative with clear imagery and standard vocabulary, often presented with an understatement that serves to underline the narrator's emotional pangs. Reigns gives us intimacy in an honest, forthright way that avoids sentimentality, melodrama, or self-indulgence. He gives us family dynamics as they pretty much are for all of us - not that the specific details are the same for all of us, but our inevitable expulsion from the Garden of Eden that is our childhood family's bosom tends to be the same. When I read one of his poems, I think of myself and my own condition - a mark of a really good poet.

A good place to start reading this collection is with the final poem, "5th Grade Photo." It's a capsule of the need we all feel in childhood and adolescence for familial acceptance as it tells the story of a young man re-examining his own childhood photo that his grandfather keeps on an end table. The beautiful concluding stanza is a tribute to his maturation, and the powerful closing two lines serve perfectly as an introduction to this excellent collection - as well as a fitting conclusion.

My favorite poem (actually, I have ten favorites) is "Auden's Edit" in which Reigns muses on why Auden deleted the line "We must love one another or die" from a war poem. "Auden's Edit" occurs appropriately about halfway through the collection, and the line reverberates in poem after poem as we encounter various aspects of the word "love" in the context of family, friendship, mentor relationships and, of course, lovers.

Reigns is a master of narrating what seems to be a harmless event while injecting a little sting at the end. In his fine poem "Ex's Webpage," the narrator stumbles onto an Internet site that contains his ex-lover's solicitation for his next "relationship." Reigns ends this irony-filled poem with this "ouch":

He wrote that he is "not choosy"
and my ego's bruise blackens.

A more ominous, wrenching poem is "Playing with the Doll," where a neighbor boy sexually abuses an almost life-size doll - and the narrator. The narrator's mother witnesses everything in silence - and then blames her son with words that damn and diminish more than the act of molestation itself:

You're such a liar, don't blame it on anyone else.
You're sick Steven."
It didn't really bother me not to be believed.
Like my father's fist, my mother's backhand,
my neighbor's weight on me
it was commonplace
and I was the stone-faced doll that took it.

"Debbie May" is a carefully crafted piece that presents an outcast high school girl trying to find acceptance. The narrator, forced deeply into self-doubt, self-blame, and self-absorption, wonders why she kept trying. Why didn't she just accept rejection, give up and die?

But I knew the answer
was growing inside me
and was alive inside Debbie.

These are surprisingly delicate, wonderfully crafted poems that you'll want to read over and over, many holding a mirror up to you, regardless of your sexual orientation, age, gender, or politics. Don't look away.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transformative Poetry at its Best - A Fantastic Collection by Steven Reigns, August 22, 2010

By 

Bryan Borland (Arkansas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Inheritance (Paperback)

I've long argued that a good poem is like a photograph, capturing a moment in time, an expression on a beloved's face we want to remember, or perhaps a hairstyle or an ex-lover that maybe we'd like to forget. Reading Steven Reign's Inheritance (Lethe Press, 2010) is like looking through a photo album. In some of the poems the family in the photographs are our neighbors; in some of the poems they are our own blood, whether we admit it or not. Sometimes the poems are not photographs at all, but flashes like those lodged in the minds of veterans back from faraway wars, post-traumatic memories that are carried around with guilt, scars, and baggage. And then there the rare love letters, written to or about people whose kindness is a miracle in itself.

Inheritance is more like a shoebox, then, one filled with artifacts gathered from life and the living of it, that is kept under our beds and pulled out when we dare to be reflective. These are poems of a true American family, the excitement of an heir promised to receive a masculine father's throne ("Dad's Empire") and how the kingdom crumbles when that heir doesn't live up to society's expectations ("After the Ballgame," "Our Last Name"). Nothing is glossed over in the suburbia that Reigns paints, which is every bit as hardcore as any American ghetto: the fractured family ("Out of Gas"), the molestation ("Playing with the Doll," "Josh"), the drug use ("Cocaine").

Such an environment produces the chase for manhood that so many gay men listlessly endure. In "Rifle," the speaker's father teaches him how to man a gun, creating a "faggot with good aim," almost to spite (or to compliment) the "purple welts that covered [the child's] body in boyhood." Then, years later, we see the speaker in "Courting an Older Lover," longing to please an older man. It is this quest that morphs so many of us into almost-monsters (in our own perceptions, anyway), and this transformation can be seen in the self-destructive behavior that sometimes lasts from childhood and into adulthood ("Bottle Tosser," "Tom").

But dark clouds make us appreciate the light, and the sense of feeling unloved makes experiencing love all the more treasured. The most touching poems of the collection introduce us to the speaker's grandfather, a man who sings Paul Anka's "Put Your Head On My Shoulder" to newborns of the family, who shares R-rated jokes with his teenage grandson, who, well, actually acts like a grandfather in a family where no one else seems to fit their roles, the children included. Let us not forget our friends, too, those families we create (as Reigns mentions in his dedication). There is a moment when the speaker asks a friend, "Would you be embarrassed to be seen with me?". She answers, "You never need to ask that question again," and we, as readers, exhale. Our boy, and by extension we, have found acceptance, which really is what these poems are all about.

After reading them, I stumbled around a bit, a newborn again, eyes squinting in the sunlight. I felt the way I feel after a good cry, drained but hopeful. I felt like I'd gone through my own shoebox. I felt like I was ready to stand up, get dressed, and go somewhere to soak in the light of my own life, with appreciation.