Boston Gordon
Boston Gordon (they/he) is a poet from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They run the You Can't Kill A Poet reading series—which highlights queer and trans identified writers in Philadelphia. Boston earned their MFA in Poetry through Lesley University. They have previously been published in such places as PRISM International, Guernica, and American Poetry Review.
Praise for Glory Holes:
Here are Boston Gordon’s poems: glory holes, each of them, with a waiting want on the other side. Where anything worth praying to is also worth desiring in lush quantity: “When you kissed / you remembered the prayers, and also / the dream.” Where we, the reader and the omnipresent, get smoked and listened to: “look, it’s the bad alleyway with the bathhouse. / Steam and men slink through the door cracks, hot.” Where “the other is howling, maybe.”
What joy and ache live in these lines and the spaces surrounding them. What a call to a world, a howling other, which lives in the dark and cracked recesses of ourselves—which is to say, all those who need it, need only read these words, close their eyes, say “comeback. Take up my space. Everyone is leaving.”
–July Westhale, author of Trailer Trash, Via Negativa, and bright news like gladiolas
Boston Gordon’s poems whistle a queer urgency that aches with desire. Here is a speaker who interrogates masculinity while simultaneously flaunting it, fearing it, and finding themself aroused by it. Tender, vulnerable, and gritty, these poems sing unapologetically of spitting and blow jobs and sex work and the strangeness of having a body.
–Lisa Summe, author of Say It Hurts