While Standing in Line for Death - by Caconrad (Paperback)

About the Book

Eighteen new (Soma)tic exercises that strive for human connection and political action.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry

Finalist for the 2018 Firecracker Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

"From these rituals come notes; from those notes come poems; and from those poems comes not just a view into his process, but an entrance into another present." --Boston Globe

After his boyfriend Earth's murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of eighteen rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry's ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

unfastened
in the backseat a
portion of the music is
mucus flying into stillness
at what point do we submit
to the authority of flowers
at what point after it enters
the mouth is it no longer in the
mouth but the throat the colon
making sumptuous death of the world
this is what crossing the line gains
no need to pretend we
are the people we
want to be in
the next life
bone under
tongue drives
taste of snow to metal...

CAConrad is the author of ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, and The Book of Frank, as well as several other books of poetry and essays. Most recently, he has co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.

Review Quotes

"Grief and survival drive these poems, but never so much that Conrad forgets anger...A ferocious work of queer rage."
-Elwin Cotman, Electric Lit

"The poems range widely from delightful to gut-wrenching and can move from despair to defiance to exuberance from line to line: 'few things tire me more than/ imagining/ reincarnation/ a child/ struggling/ all over again to/ not favor war/ not surrender to greed.' Conrad consistently surprises, and few, if any, American poets are doing more visionary, disorienting, and wonderful work today."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"At its hilt, this book exposes the little tolerance America has for the queer, the abject, and the mystical forces that Conrad and his poetry call home, and not only does it refuse to apologize, this book reclaims loss, all bruised and defiant experiences, and makes them a testament."
-Arkansas International

"Conrad may be our Ginsberg, as well as our Yoko Ono (whose work Conrad mentions), teaching us not so much how to write as how to live outside a great machine."
-Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets

"While Standing in Line for Death demonstrates that CAConrad is, in the end, a poet of defiant joy, straddling the line between self-indulgent cynicism and simpering happiness. He is a poet who fiercely embraces impossibility as the very condition of the hard-won anger and despair raging through this book."
-Tyrone Williams, PLUME

"Every word is charged to perform at its peak energetic level. Rituals call the poems into being and set the intention, and the poems themselves catalyze the energy. With their propulsive, often paratactic energies, Conrad's work in this and other books seeks to remake or reset human awareness."
-Sara Burant, OmniVerse

"Killer drones, institutional homophobia, police violence and racism, ongoing wars, While Standing in Line for Death makes all of these things impossible to ignore, and by waking us up to these realities, this uncompromising and powerful poetry also wakes us up to the agency of tuning into our own bodies and the ways they are joined to the world."
-Colin Herd, 3: AM Magazine

"The poems contain language that is eaten up, digested, and propped within their stanza like gleaning results of process. There is often a harmony within them, and a dependable personal distance to them as well. They are from within the moment-to-moment of Conrad's exercises and conductions. They are thorough investigations mesmerizing, mystical, and of the potential of the performed and the sustained, and the humbly cherished. They are, again, gifts."
-Greg Bem, Yellow Rabbits

About the Author

CAConrad is the author of ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), and The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010/Chax Press, 2009), as well as several other books of poetry and essays. Most recently, he has co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.