Club Q by James Davis

 

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

I ordered this collection back in October after James was featured in Fourteen Poems, and it arrived while we were away in Gran Canaria. We got home a few days after the shooting at Club Q and this was amongst the post waiting for me. To hear of the shooting while we were within the gay bubble of the Yumbo added to my sense of connection – I had been reflecting on the delight of being within the safe, gay majority, space – the empowerment and contentment it gave – to hear of the violation of another safe space brings all spaces into question – there is that tiny traitorous bit of your brain that think maybe hanging out in such a visible gay space might not be a great plan.

I feel it is really hard to encounter this collection so strongly within the context of the shooting – it should not be defined by someone else’s violence.

Yet the poem titled Club Q begins …

“I stand for quest, which is to say mission,

as in ‘our mission is to provide

a safe space for you to be yourself,’

which is to say ‘it is not always safe

for you to be yourself.’...”

And one of the closing stanzas of the final poem, Between Home and Sexual, is …

“It’s easy to forget

hatred never stops coming for any of us.

But hatred never stops coming for any of us.”

So the themes James engages with speak to the acts of violence that LGBT+ people experience – alive to the hostile world in which we live.

Other poems I particularly connected with were

Bi

part of a sequence responding to the two letter words allowed in Scrabble

Ta

part of the same sequence which in James writes

“Ta, God

for existing and not existing

for being non-binary that way: real and fake, a quantum

for being cooler than religion

for being way cooler than church

...”

Magnavox Opus

about if grandfather’s video tapes – and yet about so much more than that.