Romantic Comedy by James Allen Hall (2023, Trade Paperback)

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Condition:
Good
“Book is in Good condition. Cover has some wear on edges, including faint creasing on top corners. ”... Read moreabout condition
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eBay item number:267015021103
Last updated on Sep 23, 2025 06:05:49 SGTView all revisionsView all revisions

Item specifics

Condition
Good
A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including scuff marks, but no holes or tears. The dust jacket for hard covers may not be included. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with minimal creasing or tearing, minimal pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. No missing pages. See all condition definitionsopens in a new window or tab
Seller Notes
“Book is in Good condition. Cover has some wear on edges, including faint creasing on top corners. ...
ISBN
9781954245464
Category

About this product

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Four Way Books
ISBN-10
1954245467
ISBN-13
9781954245464
eBay Product ID (ePID)
14057269593

Product Key Features

Book Title
Romantic Comedy
Number of Pages
104 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, General, American / General, Lgbt
Publication Year
2023
Genre
Poetry
Author
James Allen Hall
Format
Trade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height
0.2 in
Item Length
9 in
Item Width
6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2022-033085
Dewey Edition
23
Reviews
"In Romantic Comedy' s opening poem, the speaker announces the book's genesis: 'This story / is mine: there was / a wound, then a world. / It did not mean / me well.' Thus begins a harrowing trek through a life marked by violence and a quest for sensation and connection. There is a retro sheen to these poems, a disco ball fracturing of darkness and light, an AIDS-era aura of intensity fueled by impending extinction. The book is framed by performance, by the language of theater and film, with an array of references to movies which enact the romance of brutality and the brutality of romance, to Cher and Charlie's Angels, porn and Harlequin romances read 'in the laundry room, / my head propped up on a pillow of unwashed / dresses.' The book is romantic as Keats is romantic -- it glimmers with negative capability, the 'used car salesman who, post-coitus, / cleaned himself with his Megadeath concert Tee,' the 'Bad boy who gave me chrysanthemums / and chlamydia,' the private courtyard where 'he kisses me / under a magnolia as fragrant as the one in the garden where I hid / as a boy,' 'the snow / lowering its gentle hammer on the skulls of lovers.' The book is comic in that the hero, against all odds, survives. I am astonished by the range of these poems, that they can theorize creation, 'proving desire, not god, is the father / of man,' and language, 'A pile of sticks bound for the pyre-- / it's easy to forget faggot is already plural. / Every plural scissors its singular, / everything pieces back to one...Example: the plural of story is history,' while still giving us a flesh-and-bone guide whose older brother, at Thanksgiving, 'stabs his food / with a bowie knife,' who survives rape, and who has a serious romance with suicide: 'Every gay man inhabiting my students' short stories / crossed out by AIDS or hate crime. Is it any wonder / I have failed to imagine my life won't end / in autopsy?' It's too late in the day for gloopy hope poems to do me much good, but Romantic Comedy broke me open for its willingness to go there, 'into the subway, where the rats are /...where grit diamond-sparkles in rough light, / down where the understory waits its turn / to be born, invented by fairies, told around a fire, / unfolded, weaved, made up by survivors, / by the likes of you, and me.' Romantic Comedy is a masterpiece of queer self-creation." --Diane Seuss, Levis Prize judge and winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Dewey Decimal
811.6
Synopsis
James Allen Hall returns to poetry with Romantic Comedy , a sophomore collection sounding the parameters of genre to subvert cultural notions of literary value and artistic legitimacy. What realities do stories authorize, and which remain untold? "This story," they profess in "Biography," "is mine: there was / a wound, then a world." Rather than playing into the attention economy's appetite for sensationalism, Hall's poems resist the formulaic while paying homage to the oeuvre, a formal balancing act that celebrates queer life.The poems create liberatory narratives that break constraints or speak through them. Hall parses music from the blizzard -- as when "one year / [they] watched the snow / pile to [their] door / all December, all / January," "the year [they] wanted / to die," and, faced with winter's architecture, "learned / another song. Sang / another way." Whether grieving the death of their father, documenting the survival of sexual assault, interrogating the scripts of addiction, or revisiting an '80s crime thriller, Hall's second collection constantly affirms the ingenuity of self-definition as a technology of survival.
LC Classification Number
PS3608.A54725R66

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Goodware by Konseptual

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Goodware is a carefully curated collection of thrift and used items, mostly consisting of Books, DVDs and other Media, as well as select Clothing and Miscellaneous items.. I had previously sold on ...
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