IN THE TIME OF PrEP

Chad Walsh Chapbook Series, Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018

Reviews

“In the Time of PrEP strives to . . . transcend these temporal, experiential, and traumatic realms between generations to get at something if not quite utopian, then perhaps sacred.”

——Daniel T. O’Brien, Kenyon Review

“Rancourt’s chapbook engages with the devastating effect of disease on love and on collective and personal memory.”

——Erika Nestor, Michigan Quarterly Review

“In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.”

——Reuben Gelley Newman, Indolent Books

“The poems are also a celebration of how queer intimacy has survived and thrived. There is delight and recognition of history.”

——Alicia Marie Brandewie, Nashville Review

Praise

"In this country, AIDS is no longer a quick death sentence. Jacques J. Rancourt, born the year AZT was released, makes visible its wreckage in the present. The plague years—queer bodies kissed by death and public scorn—shadow the speaker as he cruises, travels, and marries. Living and loss collide, twine. Rancourt’s language is finely chiseled, attentive to the spiritual and the carnal. In the Time of PrEP is a remarkable chapbook. Each page reminds us to live, to remember."

——Eduardo C. Corral

"These compelling poems look back to the tragedy of AIDS and to its imprint on the city of San Francisco. In the process, they give new meaning to the term "nature poem". They do justice to the wrenching relation between past and present. But the real power of these poems occurs as we see them shifting the poet towards rich and ambiguous dilemmas: towards language and laments that reveal a speaker excluded by a past he cannot enter and a present he cannot inhabit."

——Eavan Boland

"Jacques J. Rancourt’s rapturous poems look backwards and forwards at once. Living “half / in this world, half in another,” they interrogate desire and queer history, showing us how one generation struggles to understand the one before. Like all essential art, they take the long view, reminding us of what passes, what endures. We’re lucky to have this book in the world, proof of a prodigious talent and of a wise and generous heart."

——Bruce Snider