Graeme Bezanson's debut collection, Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity.
"The truth no one wants to name," writes bell hooks, "is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within." These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. The book's three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader's diary, broken up by two interludes of "divinations" – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk's Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine Ultra Blue is a sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary masculinity. • ROUTINE VIOLENCE: Bezanson's debut full-length collection explores an incredibly timely topic - the malignant and contradictory nature of toxic masculinity.
• ADVOCATE FOR POETRY: Graeme Bezanson was the co-founder and editor of Coldfront (2007-2017), as well as the Poetry Editor at LIT Magazine (2007-2009). Poems published during his tenure were twice-selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry annual anthology. In 2013, the Huffington Post named him among the Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry.
