Fantasia for the Man in Blue

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man's late-night encounter with a police officer-the titular "e;man in blue"e;-becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: "e;It's a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I'm too ashamed to want for myself."e; In "e;Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,"e; the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an "e;infant's small mouth"e; as well as the "e;sad calculator"e; that was "e;built to subtract from and divide a town."e; In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the "e;other"e; and locates us squarely within these personae.