A REVIEW OF DREW PISARRA’S PERIODIC BOYFRIENDS
Periodic Boyfriends, Drew Pisarra. Capturing Fire Press, 2023. 152 pages. $20.00
by Laura Rebecca
Ah, Pride month. Feels so long ago. The 2023 edition of this 30-day-long celebration was rife with artistic ups and political downs, but I’d prefer to focus on the former.
One of these creative bright spots was the release of Drew Pisarra’s new volume of poetry, Periodic Boyfriends. Released in June 2023, Pisarra’s latest sonnet cycle is inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements and the poet’s one-night-stand catalog. Fans of queer poetry may already know Drew Pisarra’s work through his previous poetry collection, Infinity Standing Up (2019) which received favorable reviews in many journals and literary publications including The Washington Post.
Drew Pisarra is not only a poet, but also a playwright, short story author, actor, director, and one-time performance artist. He is a grantee of Café Royal Cultural Foundation (2019), Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators (2021), and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2023). Among his other works are the radio play The Strange Case of Nick M. and the short story collections You’re Pretty Gay (2021) and Publick Spanking (1996).
Other reviewers have described this volume as “what you get when you pair Grindr problems with the human need to rationalize existence”(Patrick Key) and the poems themselves as “powerful, provocative, sexy sonnets is a play unto itself with two characters wrestling – coming together, falling away, then perhaps back again” (Linda Manning). Ok, so what is it?
In poetry, as in other art forms, a particular format imposes stylistic rules upon the work that forces the artist to be more creative than they would be without it: in poetry, the haiku and the villanelle come to mind. In Pisarra’s last volume, Infinity Standing Up, the poet uses the sonnet form to create amuse-bouche vignettes of queer love served in an antique verse framework: in this book, he pushes the challenge further by crafting a sonnet dedicated to a past fling for each of the elements of the Periodic Table. In the first poem, what may be a dedication of sorts to “The Periodic Boyfriend”, he observes that “…Love and Sex possess like chemistries/ when I survey my carnal history…”
If chemistry is not your thing, however, hang on: it’s not all beakers and burners. The author guides us through his “research”, a homoerotic flashback of passing paramours over what could be the course of many years (which, to the non-queer population, may seem voluminous, but is really not atypical; besides, what good is a study unless there’s a range of subjects?)
For example, “Iodine” (the heaviest essential mineral nutrient) is a dreamy first-person romantic verse about seeing oneself “reincarnated” and “intertwined” with another. In “Tantalum”, the poet takes a different tone: evoking this hard, corrosion-resistant metal in a cruel dialogue of temptation and denial, but reminding the object of his affection that “It’s not a big deal.” Then, there’s “Palladium”, and knowing that we all thought it was the name of a nightclub, the poet places the speaker in a seamy, savage den of dance and drunkenness, complete with a “gigantic glitterball” and a stranger in “navy whites” befitting this silvery-white element.
Some sonnets, like “Iridium” tease a rhyme, and others like “Phosphorus” feature dialogue: Pisarra never overstates the form and keeps each poem as varied as the qualities of the 118 elements. One particular favorite is “Chromium”, the element that gives us the chrome of hubcaps and motorcycle engines, which is written in a cadence that evokes the revving of an engine: “…i would not / did not / would that i had when i should have / i hid behind you…”
Vroom vroom, indeed.
Drew Pisarra may very well have blinded us with science in this volume of verse: If you want to celebrate pride by reading something by a queer author that will make you laugh, gasp, and give you what the kids call “the feels”, and make you go, “Huh? Huh!”, then I highly recommend it.
Laura Rebecca is an artist, writer, editor, and former teacher who does nothing of note.
You can find her snarky comments on Twitter @dojogrl, her other critiques on Substack ,
and her art on Instagram: @laurasartdumpster.