Part reckoning with a father's chronic illness, part coming of age in the Upper South, part meditation on the slow, painful accumulation of adulthood, Another Man considers issues of family, care, and inheritance. These powerful poems capture unexpected moments of lucidity among the desire and heartbreak of becoming oneself. In his debut collection, Jim Whiteside astonishes with turns of phrases that pinpoint the beauty in the mundane-the "waterfalling bodies" of fish while stocking a pond-and the mundane in the tragic, as in the realization after his father's death that "in the end so much is paperwork." In revealing his origin story, the poet redefines the queer poem in a more nuanced and contemporary way, acknowledging queer life beyond conventional narratives. Filled with a zeal for life, a yearning for joy, and moments of sublime satisfaction, this collection shimmers with longing and freedom: "So many things our parents never mentioned, / so we gave ourselves permission."
Jim Whiteside is the author of the chapbook Writing Your Name on the Glass. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, he has published poems in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he teaches creative writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.
Clock with Reverse Gears *** Arkansas Nuclear One Stocking the Pond Neighbors Killing Birds with Stones Eighth Grade Aunt Crane Hums Lee Ann Womack While Working at the Super D Drug Store Sestina Ice Storm, 1996 Commerce Morning Meditation Vessel High School Punk Show Rock Fest Mosh Pit Ode Aunt Crane Works for the Hot Air Balloon Company near Tucson, Arizona Furtive Monologue Tennessee Meditation *** The summer my father was a cowboy Last Month Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics Inventory Do Not Inventory My Father Tells Me He Would Choose to Die Oracle Parable Inventory Stinging Tide Bureaucracies Final Lesson on Love from My Mother and Father Shovel Last Poem with My Father in It *** Reckoning Morning Meditation Theory of Destiny Theory of the Days and Nights Theory of Power Theory of Revealing Parable Open Take My Bones Away Parable To You in Georgia from Me in North Carolina Judith Mountains Sol Invictus Poem on the Transbay Tube Blueprints for Future Homes Argeles-sur-Mer *** Before the Elegies Acknowledgments Notes
"A piercing and formally intelligent collection, Another Man weaves narrative urgency with lyric pressure to create a charged extended meditation on what it means to be confronted with death and absence and still find life. The poems thrum with intensity and the precision of a brilliant mind, aware." - Airea D. Matthews, judge, Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
