Fine Poet, Fine Book

Run, don't walk, to your local bookstore to order Jason Schneiderman's debut collection, Sublimation Point. I read the manuscript last year, but it's so much better to now hold this fine book in my hands. I keep coming back to the poem "Now," in particular: quietly conversational yet relentless in its pursuit of laying bare the speaker, the subject, the moment: this is good stuff. Congratulations, Jason!

Here's the poem:

NOW

We leave the subway together,
it's night, and I wish we'd gone to my place.
I say, it's happening, now:
People are coming out of the darkness,
the same darkness we walk through,
with knives and guns and disease.

We turn the corner and you say
Say men, you mean men are pushing men
up against the trees and down against
beds and sideways into tiled walls.
Say men, you say, you mean men.

We are coming to your building,
and I say, Men, yes, I mean men.
Men are forcing their way into each other,
following each other into bathroom stalls
and bedrooms, hiding in parks,
forgetting to be scared,
infecting and infecting and infecting.

We are in the elevator and you say
Say me, you mean me.
Say he pushed me against the bed
or the tree or the wall
and infected me. Say I am infected,
you mean me.

We are here. I am undressing.
I say, You, you are infected and
he is always fucking you.
He is with us in the parks and the clubs
and this bed. I mean you.
I mean him. I mean now.