Re-Animator

Jeffery Berg's Animator comes at you with all the shock and surprise of a phantasmagorical horror movie, with "edits so quick it makes the murders feel / swift," a perfect way to encapsulate the 1980s for those of us who lived through AIDS and the absolute indifference of the Reagan administration. Reagan is re-animated here, too, as a sad and lonely clown, along with the music, movies and fashions of that decade, "bygone Big Mac days in rooms / of erased people." The sexiness of pop culture littered with a few Arby's bags for verisimilitude and some Pier One candles for flair lends this collection a richness of palette, the way Bob Dylan and the Pointer Sisters and Willie Nelson enriched the sound of "We Are the World." If you were alive and gay and ready for the world in the 80s, you will get it, and if you weren't, well...this book will teach you about some of what you missed. Jeffery Berg is simultaneously witty, funny, dirty, moving, eloquent and rhapsodic, like the lyrics to a really good Queen song.

-D.A. Powell

In this incisive, deliciously specific collection, Jeffery Berg inspirits the relics and ghosts of an American childhood and youth that is at once arrestingly familiar, fantastical, and fraught. Whether he's evoking Jason from Friday the 13^th or invoking the lyrics of "We Are the World," he traces the masks and acts that disguise and reveal, while unraveling and reweaving the veils of identity, gender, and place. "I rewrite, I myth-make / the discos, cracked records, / Astaire, and bodies that didn't make it / this long," Berg writes. "I rework them into air, / into glass, shimmering, pricked / into a slivery frock / above pits of this earth." Re-Animator takes us back and leads us forward, as we revisit our past and so reclaim our present, with generosity and wisdom.

-David Groff