John Bonanni: retrovirology, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry Kramer and Gaëton Dugas, others operate as ekphrasis against the creative artwork of ACT UP's direct actions. Combining reinterpretations of formal elements such as the concrete poem, the abecedarian, and the villanelle, post-confessional poems converse with a docupoetic history through an arc that examines what it meant to grow up Queer as a child in rural Pennsylvania in the late '80s and early '90s, surrounded by messages of gay disease and the violence of its silences. retrovirology, then, resurrects Queer elders to allow memory to "rise from its subjugated state" (Jung) and to carry with it, into our futures, all of its wisdom and fire.