New sonnet collection inspired by queer love and chemistry

‘Periodic Boyfriends’ offers intriguing poetry from Drew Pisarra

By KATHI WOLFE

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If you’d told me that I’d get as much of a kick out of sonnets inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements as Cole Porter got from Champagne, I would have thought you’d had too much bubbly. Until I read “Periodic Boyfriends,” queer poet and writer Drew Pisarra’s intriguing new poetry collection.

With his sleight of hand, Pisarra puts all of us, chemistry lovers and naysayers, under his spell.

“Periodic Boyfriends” is a collection of sonnets inspired by queer love and the periodic table of elements.

Periodic Boyfriends

By Drew Pisarra

c.2023, Capturing Fire Press $20 | 152 pages

Pisarra writes sonnets that Shakespeare, who some scholars think was queer, would, I’d wager, have enjoyed reading with his BFFs.

Each of the witty, sometimes poignant, nearly always captivating, sonnets in “Periodic Boyfriends” is titled with the name for an element in the periodic table (such as the poems titled “Hydrogen,” “Boron,” “Lithium” and “Palladium”).

The sonnets riff off Pisarra’s one-night stands, cybersex encounters and memories of queer men who’ve died.

Through his poetic alchemy, Pisarra makes you see why combining queer eros with periodic elements isn’t an obscure mystery.

Chemistry as defined by the “Oxford English Dictionary,” is “the complex emotional or psychological interaction between two people,” Angie Morrill notes in the introduction to “Periodic Boyfriends.”

Chemistry contains the elements – from silver to tin to gold – that make up the world.

Pisarra’s sonnets illuminate how his onenight stands are immersed in chemistry (in all senses of the word). He uses the periodic table of elements to track his erotic encounters with more than 118 men.

If anyone else tried this, it would likely be a snooze. After the sonnet about the 50th boyfriend, the reader might well wonder: are we there yet?

But, there are no worries with Pisarra. In the tight form of the sonnet – in just 14 lines – Pisarra presents a narrative with as many twists and turns (infused with irony, snark and tearing-up moments) as a compelling novel or must-binge-watch TV show. You can’t wait to turn the page or watch the next episode.

Pisarra, 58, decimates the image of the poet as an ethereal bard nesting in the clouds — sipping the nectar of the angelic gods.

You can tell from just a line of his poetry that he isn’t based on Mount Olympus. Pisarra, who grew up in Silver Spring, Md., now lives in New York.

“Periodic Boyfriends” is steeped in the images, music, and beat of New York City streets and queer culture (with some literary, but not pompous, allusions tossed in the mix).

“You occupy a space inside my skull/though who gave you access I’ve not a clue,” Pisarra writes in “Polonium,” a sonnet addressed to one of his boyfriends from the past. “The ache’s persistent, illogical, dull./Your thermal imprint’s one I can’t undo./”

Pisarra’s sonnets often joyfully combine the everyday language of love and insults. “Calling the ugliest lay from my past./,” he writes in “Dubnium,” “Guess what, babe. You rocked. That night was a blast.”

The poems in “Periodic Boyfriends” will pop for readers, queer and hetero. But there’s no way of missing (who would want to?) that these sonnets are immersed in a queer sensibility.

“You lived next door! I heard” Pisarra writes in “Rutherfordium,” “you were a hairdresser from Ecuador/(the last queen to top me in Baltimore).”

Pisarra uses the tight form of the sonnet and his playfulness and wit to speak not only of dancing, and “the hate fuck” but of more somber parts of life (and death) from becoming sober to suicide.

In the “Lanthanides,” a series of sonnet-like poems (that tamper a bit with the structure of a sonnet), Pisarra turns elegiac. In these poems, he writes sometimes playfully, sometimes wistfully, by turns, poignantly about LGBTQ men who have died. “Uncle Jimmy had a lover. Sadly/” he writes in “Lanthanum, “for Uncle Jimmy and my dad)”, “no one knew his name.”

Another sequence of poems, “The Actinides,” is about Pisarra’s online sexual encounters. Accounts of cyber trysts are rarely such fun. Check out “Periodic Boyfriends.” It’s like hanging out on a summer’s night with the acclaimed queer poet Frank O’Hara and Dorothy Parker.

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