Beforelight

By Matthew Gellman

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of
rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts
the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity,
ultimately committing to the self's authenticity as the highest form of
devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with
the fragility of our most formative connections—familial, communal, and
ancestral—as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to
discover how not to “make a life out of pain.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781960145116

Book preview

Cover: Beforelight, Poems by Matthew Gellman

BEFORELIGHT

Matthew Gellman

Foreword by Tina Chang

NEW POETS OF AMERICA SERIES NO. 52

BOA EDITIONS, LTD. * ROCHESTER, NY * 2024

Copyright © 2024 by Matthew Gellman

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Tina Chang

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

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For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [e-mail].

Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 101 for special individual acknowledgments.

Cover Design: Sandy Knight

Cover Art: Enteromorphia compressa, ß prolifera by Anna Atkins

Interior Design and Composition: Isabella Madeira

BOA Logo: Mirko

BOA Editions books are available electronically through BookShare, an online distributor offering Large-Print, Braille, Multimedia Audio Book, and Dyslexic formats, as well as through e-readers that feature text to speech capabilities.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Foreword

So Much Light

*

Replica

Little Brother

Mother, Sleeveless

Brother, Age Six

Homecoming

Not Music

The Wheat Field

Brother with Rupture

Doe

Snipe

*

Lacuna

Ephemerals

My Family Asks Me to Speak

Painting November

Night Logic

Brother in E Flat

Echo Lake

Trying to Grow

Brother in C Minor

Sixteen

Connor

*

In Second Grade Our Mothers Help Us Believe in Fairies

Pause

Smoke

Special Report, After Rain

Beforelight

Brother, in August, with Hesitation

Watching the Heron with My Mother, I Remember Apertures

*

Dialectic with Snow

Grand Island, Nebraska

Something Like Grace

Cloudburst

Rob

New Year’s Eve in Dresher, Pennsylvania

Tyler

Mother, After the Hurricane

Hunt

Saint Timothy’s School, 1975

Alpenglow

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Colophon

All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me!

—Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

For my mother

FOREWORD

The first words of Matthew Gellman’s magnificent debut collection Beforelight include All, Everywhere, and So Much, a gesture to Gellman’s artistic leaning toward abundance in his soulful journey of personhood and selfhood. He fills moments of inner questioning with generosity in the form of light, in the form of seeing, and remembering, in its multi-faceted praise of love and desire. While the reader is invited into the muscular