Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the...

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity, ultimately committing to the self's authenticity as the highest form of devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative connections--familial, communal, and ancestral--as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to discover how not to "make a life out of pain."


Author: Matthew Gellman
Publisher: BOA Editions
Published: 04/30/2024
Pages: 101
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781960145109

About the Author
Matthew Gellman is a 2022-2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His poems have appeared in several literary journals. His chapbook, Night Logic, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. His highly sought after manuscript of Beforelight, was a finalist for Tupelo Press' Berkshire Prize, Four Way Books' Larry Levis Prize, the Alice James Book Award, and BOA Editions' A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Gellman holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn NY.