My Life as Adam

By Bryan Borland

Poems touching on religion, sexuality, Southern life, and self-acceptance reveal the poet's growing up, coming out, and becoming an adult in all its joys and sorrows. My Life as Adam is Bryan Borland's full-length debut and was included as one of only five collections of poetry on the American Library Association's inaugural "Over the Rainbow" list of best LGBT books of 2010.

Says reviewer Grady Harp: `You have to have been there...’ No, this insensitive statement regarding whether or not the reader can or would understand the depth of feeling of a journeyman is shattered in Bryan Borland’s intensely honest and painfully lovely book of poems, MY LIFE AS ADAM. Bryan Borland is a gay poet, writing from experiences and developmental thought patterns that have defied the at times Sisyphusian steps to becoming a sexually liberated male. He enters his world as a nascent, ambiguous ADAM and returns at the end a fully developed MAN.

While other authors have occultly coped with homosexuality – writers such as Thomas Mann, Henry James, EM Forster, and Herman Melville – Borland emerges, not from a retrospective speculation or latter day unveiling of truths that were always there, quietly shrouded in correctness, but from an immediate stance, his home in Little Rock, Arkansas, a place where the dimensions of religion, family, and sexuality are more rigidly drawn, perhaps, than on the coastal bifurcations of a country still at war with individual rights and freedoms. Borland deals gently, if with some pain, with the process heretofore known as `coming out’ – a phrase science and intellect have quashed with the examination of DNA positions on our genetic helices that mark our characteristics as we move from infancy toward adulthood. He writes of awakening feelings and early experiences, at times believed to be one-sided on the surface, a lost moment forgotten, but in retrospect lightening the dark room of being alone, incapable of feeling or defining or expressing love.

And while other poets may flail at the `ties that bind’, Borland instead explores them with the gentlest sense of understanding and belonging that family and religion have defined as normalcy. He paints the atmosphere in which he grew, the cloudy homophobia making dark his possibility of self-recognition and esteem. Lust – more easily explored, recalled, fantasized – too often, he opines, replaced love/embrace/touch/need. For instance, read ‘Watching Brokeback Mountain in Little Rock’ and the window to understanding will open. Borland is one of the few poets who is able to so deftly define the thin line between straight and gay, especially addressing the totems and rituals that are designed to introduce the afterwards. But he is equally able to present the joy of finding a life partner/husband as in ‘Shopaholic’.

When he sings of found loves he celebrates his hard won treasure, and when he has lost that love, as in `Holden’, `The Book of David’, or `The Book of Joshua, Epilogue’, he has learned more about commitment and perception than most will acknowledge. Borland’s verse is free, shaped meaningfully on the page as though he were opening windows for fellow travelers to gain hold on a future that can be positive. Bryan Borland’s first book of his poems, MY LIFE AS ADAM, is his life and he owns it, a life of sensing, noticing, yearning for the bite of the forbidden apple where the fruit has been distorted by religions and codices of human behavior in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent him from acceptance of what he intuited would be beautiful. It is this journey to date he sensitively shares – like that little beggar along the path who smiles at our sheckles and says thank you in a way that changes us – permanently. – Grady Harp, September 2010 (extracted from the complete review published in POETS AND ARTISTS October 2010).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sibling Rivalry Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781937420055

Bryan Borland

Bryan Borland is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Little Rock, Arkansas, and the owner of Sibling Rivalry Press. His first book, My Life as Adam, was one of only five collections of poetry included on the American Library Association's "Over the Rainbow" list of notable LGBT-themed books published in 2010. He is the founding editor of Assaracus, the only print journal in the world dedicated exclusively to the poetry of gay men. His work has appeared in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Breadcrumb Scabs, Referential Magazine, vox poetica, Ganymede, and Velvet Mafia, among others. For more about Bryan, visit his website at www.bryanborland.com.

Book preview

THE POEMS OF BRYAN BORLAND

Adam in Hindsight: God’s Inconvenience

by Philip F. Clark

Who can tell how a poem is born to anyone, let alone those who are born to poetry itself? When does the process of being become self-recognition? In Bryan Borland’s case, it is closer to the symbolic and sacred rib: ripped away to give life elsewhere, its loss provides not absence but insight. There is nothing less, but rather something larger. The new being is formed of words from the heart; the knowledge gained is the raw skin and bone of language. The body is renewed and written upon.

His poetry is a direct confrontation with all that we've taken for granted, in anything that we believe, and he throws back on us the reflections of a gay man in the process of making his own wide-eyed, questioning new Adam – his roving mind is God’s ultimate inconvenience, as he runs full force from

…planting seeds of normalcy that never grew.

Normalcy is barren. Religion is questionable and foreign to a spirit and eye that has seen and felt something beyond the place that everyone else is telling you to look. Adulthood is reached by looking in the other direction. And Borland always does.

What good is a son who questions every commandment? This is poetry not only about being gay, but becoming gay. Finding voice in the body, the mind, and the spirit of complete refusal. In Borland’s view of earthly delights, if we have no faith other than love, then that is all the faith we need.

To say these are love poems is to underestimate their intent. Here, love is where flesh converges with questioning: where a budding knowledge of being different is what is gladly bitten into – that sweet apple of the male body. It is gained in motel rooms, speeding cars, hospitals where friends lay dying. It is found in quiet kitchens, stinking trenches, and crowded proms; on the mouths of married men, in the arms of brothers, on the

...musty shirts stolen from locker rooms

forced over feathered pillows that didn’t love us back.

The boys-becoming-men who populate these poems are tear-stained, cum-stained, and shit-stained, all the fluids of no remorse. Whether married or single, gay or straight, they are banded together by need – which is sometimes love, but most often only lust. Yet none of them bat an eye at love's lying condolences. Unscathed by betrayal, they scrape up, wipe themselves off, and move on, still sure that love is just ahead; that someone is always on the way to them:

it is not good for man

to be alone

when he discovers his soul

is between his legs.

Borland is attuned to contemporary vernacular oracles, Iraqed, Columbined, and 9/11ed to death, piping the heated mix of dance and grunt, sigh and wish, headline news and sudden tweet into poems that enjoy illicit readings. Somewhere, too, others are under the covers with flashlights hoping to decipher in the dark some explanation for all their sweating questions. But fuses are also shortening. Why wait for something to happen? Make it happen first:

It was easy to see why we’d pace like dogs

who’d turned on their owners,

the bloody fingers of blame pointing our way,

the predictable story:

the ones who everybody knew

got kicked in the gut

and would explode at any time

like dangerous, queer grenades.

What opens in these poems is a sense of surprise – at how wonderful it is to simply touch another human being. A world where sex is still contained to the flesh and the surprise of connection, the ardor of actually touching someone rather than sexting them in cyberspace. They recall a time

…when connections were made on the strength of a glance

not the invisible muscle of manic wireless signals...

The world’s electric hum herds us into consciousness. The culture of the quick fix has become the culture of the quick fuck. Facebook has replaced the Good Book. Married men on the make on Sundays after church. Make no mistake, Borland understands and accepts the camaraderie of cyber-culture and its possibilities for fraternal auguries. It’s a wide, sex-filled world out there, just waiting to be tasted. Press button, click, send. Who’s online? Who’s out there? Choices everywhere, but which to choose? But in the end, it’s found lacking and