Book Review: Periodic Boyfriends

Periodic Boyfriends
By Drew Pisarra

Review by Julie Carpenter



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​It’s a rare writer who can combine laughter and tragedy, light and darkness, not only in the same poem, but in the same sentence. Drew Pisarra is that writer. The poems in this collection – a look back at all the boyfriends and lovers in his life through the metaphor of the periodic table – are a kaleidoscope of beauty, sadness, boredom, love, and all things human. Life seen through the lens of memory. The author transforms love and loss and even bleary eyed moments of regret into poetry.
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This book is sharp and lovely,  loving too in spite of all its honesty.  There's grace for everyone involved – including the author himself. Pisarra's memory - clear eyed, yet kind, scathing but self-deprecating, is what makes this slim collection work. This book is more than a romantic history,  it's a philosophy of how one might see the past.
 
Each poem is linked with an element and the resulting boundaries inspire poems carved small and perfect – cameo snapshot encounters. Each one a sketch of a man, of a moment, of longing, regret, or rejection that leaves the reader with a sense of the humanness of it all.
 
It’s a balancing act that works. 
 
Links to purchase book:

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Bio:

A grantee of Café Royal Cultural Foundation (2019), Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators (2021), and the Lower Manhattan Cutlural Council (2023), Drew Pisarra is also author of the previous poetry collection Infinity Standing Up [lauded as "brazen and lusty and often amusing" by The Washington Post] and the short story collection, You're Pretty Gay (2021) [excerpted by Ms. magazine].

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