To Collect The Flesh

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Nominated for a 1997 Minnesota Book Award, TO COLLECT THE FLESH is Greg Hewett’s first book of poems. These poems are finely crafted, deftly phrased, and sometimes outrageously funny. Included in this book is a meditation on Mantegna’s painting of St. Sebastian; a tribute to Hewett’s father titled Tarzan is Dead; and an ode describing a “love affair” between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Hewett’s poetry is influenced by living in Norway, Denmark, and Japan. “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile! Walt Whitman meets Oscar Wilde: From the first line to the last, these poems are bold, unabashed, unafraid. Greg Hewett takes on the argument of eros and comes out in favor of a discourse of love that excludes no one, leaves out nothing. This is an original voice refusing to be rooted in the shame that cloisters the American body politic. Through his startling honesty and the stunning lyrical economy of his language, Hewett makes us face up to George Washington’s homoerotic past, the haunting of our landscape by the longing for love, and the secrets of outlawed desire that press the boundaries of male experience. Pushing to find and share the ‘language of men,’ the poems explore the power of the father as a promise that turns threatening or disappointing, attempt to make the chaos of feeling reasonable in the face of grief, and, in a final act of defiance, celebrate sex and desire. This is the gay voice we’ve been waiting for one that has the confidence, wit and intelligence to write truthfully and comfortably about love and life, refusing to separate experiences into parts of the self, demanding that he must give and take it all to know himself, to make himself known”–Jonis Agee, author of ACTS OF LOVE ON INDIGO ROAD and A .38 SPECIAL AND A BROKEN HEART.