paper • 104 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-954245-46-4
eISBN: 978-1-954245-47-1
March 2023 • Poetry
Romantic Comedy
James Allen Hall
Winner of the 2020 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry
James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy, a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? “This story,” they profess in “Biography,” “is mine: there was / a wound, then a world.” Rather than playing into the attention economy’s appetite for sensationalism, Hall’s poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life. The poems create liberatory narratives that break constraints or speak through them. Hall parses music from the blizzard — as when “one year / [they] watched the snow / pile to [their] door / all December, all / January,” “the year [they] wanted / to die,” and, faced with winter’s architecture, “learned / another song. Sang / another way.” Whether grieving the death of their father, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting an ’80s crime thriller, Hall’s second collection constantly affirms the ingenuity of self-definition as a technology of survival.
“Prophecy”
Remember, my mother says, they found Adam Walsh
in pieces, buttoning my jacket, kissing my cheek,
sending me off to school, directly across
the dead-end road. Street severed by woods,
I couldn’t shake its prophecy. In school, we play
Hangman: on the chalkboard, a neck in a rope,
a word underneath in dashes, letters looming
from the fog, filling in the blanks, until
one grinning boy hangs another.
About the Author