Customer Reviews

Tea (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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By turns delightful and sad, D.A. Powell's _Tea_ is an ecstatic heartbreak, a celebration that takes place with the music of explosions all around. Powell fearlessly exposes his life and the deaths all around him, with inventive language and gorgeously nuanced rhythms. He raids pop culture for metaphors that are ridiculous and painfully beautiful, as in this passage elegizing his friend Nicholas: "you are/repeating the same episodes: nick at night." Who would have thought the endless reruns on Nickelodeon would yield such a stark and haunted metaphor?

Powell is bright, campy, sultry, somber, intelligent, and perceptive. His long lines reach into the grave and beyond it. He has the brashness and swish of a swashbuckler, the mournful tone of a nightingale, and some hot bedroom eyes seering the desolate landscape of a world ravaged by disease. How can he be so funny and so sad simultaneously? This book is a treasure for the next millenium.

What D. A. Powell has expressed in his book, Tea, is an anthem to the feelings and fears of every queer born in the sixties: that we have been both blessed and cheated for being who we are - at the time that we are - though often, distinguishing what is blessing and what is damnation is at the core of our struggle. His style is unique and challenging, as are our lives. And the mixture of tone is as complex as the various masks that we don: saint, sinner, perpetrator or innocent bystander. The range of expression is wide yet completely familiar. This book shall be a classroom text standard for the next generation who should want to understand the complexities of our collective experience.