These poems grapple with how romantic relationships, both gay and straight, are defined—and what we gain or lose from these definitions. The poems reflect on the experience not only of the poet, but also of wives throughout history, particularly as represented in classic literary texts, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Joan Didion.
Fitzpatrick’s “The Genius of Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With,” for example, is inspired by a paragraph in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, while the fragments of the central poetry sequence, “Mr. &,” draw their language from the final chapters of books by Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Kate Chopin, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Sheila Heti, Susanna Kaysen, Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. “The Definition Of” comprises various Google results for different manipulations of the phrase “marriage is,” and his poem “Vow” reimagines what is thought to be Anne Boleyn’s last letter to her husband Henry VIII, written while she was awaiting execution at the Tower of London.
Together, these poems constitute an extended meditation on what comes after the ampersand in the phrase that serves as the title of the book: “Mr. &.”
Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014). His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2017, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry, Fitzpatrick lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.
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