Snap.Shot by Brandon Blue

In language that’s fresh and in poems guided by formal invention, Brandon Blue’s Snap.Shot describes love’s passages of joy and sadness, the pleasures and perils of physical and emotional passion. Snap.Shot is a convincing and promising introduction to a deft new voice in American poetry.

–Michael Collier, author of The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, The Neighbor, The Ledge, Dark Wild Realm, An Individual History: Poems, and My Bishop and Other Poems

Brandon Blue‘s Snap.Shot takes ekphrasis — writing about other art forms — to new heights in this exciting debut collection full of sword swallowing yearning dressed in pleaser heels. Zooming into the blur of a photograph or painting or video, Blue turns our attention towards the oftentimes unexamined and quieter intimacies of queer desire, the areas where shame or want deferred struggles to buck against the frame, distilling for us this very lone moment in time where one’s reaching comes alive. This collection asks a persistent question: How can any poem, image, or body remain unchanged after what it has seen and endured? The answer: The poem, the image, the body, let them all shapeshift, borrowing their parts from one another in the inventive spirit of gender fuck, no feeling or word left behind. This is the ultimate drag, this becoming and becoming, until finally — it breaks free; it is.

–Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti and Imagine Us, The Swarm