Quarantine
Drawing from Caravaggio’s religious paintings, the music of Erik Satie, and the personal obituary, this collection remembers oft-overlooked stories and queers familiar ones to question the concept of quarantine and what it means to separate ourselves from or with others. Refusing to be morose or tragic, Quarantine is a collection of poems that commune with the anonymous dead of the pre-Stonewall and early AIDS eras; a love letter from one body to another, knowing that to love is to die, yet choosing still to love.
Reviews
“I read Scott Chalupa’s Quarantine with fierce, nonstop attention—its documentary frankness and humanity (graced with glints of rescuing camp) is that gripping. Chalupa is a superb and warrior-strong chronicler of the chaos, persecution, and struggle of the plague years, and his portraits of men and women grappling with AIDS during the first decade of the upending pandemic (“Oh God, how I wanted / to ride your ghost into the future”) are gallant, tough-minded, exact, and unforgettable. I salute this remarkable poet’s unstinting craft and emotional bravery.”
—Cyrus Cassells, author of Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award
Scott Chalupa’s Quarantine is formally innovative in ways that make us rethink the confines of the poem itself. Whether through well-wrought end rhymes or nonce forms resembling obituary articles, each of these lyric wonders is bordered and etched so finely that we can’t help but imagine the workman (the poet!) hypnotized by his own labor. That trick of hypnotism is necessary in this elegiac and harrowing poetry that walks the lines between love and life and death. Melancholy and meditative, this is a beautiful book.
—Jericho Brown
In Quarantine, Scott Chalupa writes of a time and a place in which gay men “tried always to hold hands at / night because then it was death / to love a man in the light.” When being gay was inseparable from living with HIV—not necessarily being HIV-positive, but living with the virus and its implications all around you, all the time. Chalupa plays with queer liminality—the blurred borders between in and out, closet and tearoom, consent and coercion, pleasure and pain…and how all of this fucks with queer minds, daring us to love our shame, to embrace our guilt, to glory in our excommunications. “It seems that all I do these days is write / about the dead,” one speaker says: it is a sacred trust that Chalupa has taken on with grace, dignity, and wit.
—Michael Broder
The most startling of the poems in Scott Chalupa’s debut collection Quarantine come in the form of obituaries for nameless men (the text of which often wraps around missing photographs). These obituaries explore our relationship with the dead and with history (gay history in this case) and get at a central concern of the book: what is the truth?
—Stephen S. Mills, author of He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and
A History of the Unmarried