Brocken Spectre - by Jacques J Rancourt (Paperback)

About the Book

"Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorializing and romanticizing tragedy. Caught between generations with no queer ancestral guidance, poems consider the ethical implication of memory, of public and private tragedies"--

Book Synopsis

Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorializing and romanticizing tragedy.

Review Quotes

"Harnessing new visions from the traditions of Mark Doty and James L. White, Rancourt crystalizes the modern sublime through intelligent, complicated, and elegiac modes of inquiry through the plights and heights of the human body. Through embodied desires both difficult and triumphant, these poems recast their dreams with a deft touch of wit, poise, and an openness for transformation equal to their ambition to preserve the past and its ghosts. Bravo." --Ocean Vuong

About the Author

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). His poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets, among others. He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in San Francisco.