Brutal Companion is Ruben Quesada’s newest, aptly titled, collection of poetry from Barrow Street Press.

A true companion to the brutality of everyday existence amidst self-discovery, queerness, and loss, this collection is a dark hallway littered with small, round windows where light — and life — pour in.

Brutal Companion is divided into three parts, each section punctuating the poet’s musings on an unabridged queer life in all its beauty and gore.

The first section of the book begins with a scripture quote from the Book of Matthew and is promptly followed by the line “My mother is going to die.” 

This first line sets the stage for Quesada’s forward writing style. He doesn’t keep the reader guessing, but rather lets them in on the longing and guilt we all carry on the tips of our tongues. The poet acts as a voice for experiences that queer people — and more specifically, queer men — are shamed to keep quiet.

Quesada takes the reader on a journey of life’s mundanities and the deeper wells pooling beneath them. In the poem “IN LUBBOCK, TEXAS” Quesada writes:

There’s a park with dips 

and mounds of crabgrass 

streaming into patches 

of rust-colored dirt 

where you ride 

your horse.

Often, those wells of meaning that bubble beneath the surface of mundane moments, are not the prettiest to look at. And Quesada is not afraid to share the ugly parts of love and loss in this collection.

In the poem “DECOMPOSITION” Quesada writes in a dreamlike fashion of a grief forming, almost as a precursor to loss: 

On this last day, you’d stumbled, half alive, onto the drawn curtain in the corner of your room. We watched ghostly orbs of light one last time drifting in like laughter. An ice cream truck’s siren song shook you back to life from the hunger for heroin. Outside, children passed. Photographs browned like honey from years of smoke covering the walls. I watched you from your bed where so many worlds undressed beneath the sap-like weight of phosphorous.

While themes of loss are certainly a focal point in this collection, “Brutal Companion” does not omit hope. Framed by social politics, in “I WAS A BOY” Quesada reflects on the inner complexities of queer childhood, cementing his resilience, and establishing the background for other poems in the collection that detail his experiences with men and love.

As a boy, I was unbearably uncomfortable 

about my body and the men my mother dated 

gave me erections in the bathroom 

as I thought of them under the hiss 

of the shower to drown out the catcalls 

from boys at school who threatened to kill me 

every afternoon. I have tried to avoid 

blaming myself for being called a faggot 

for most of my life, I could not escape it 

but those days have gone like the gospel 

of Anita Bryant

This is poetry that is meant to be read lamp-lit in the dark, under the fluorescents of a subway platform, or in the beaming sun, the pages warm in your lap. This is poetry that light will find, and poetry about what the light will find.

Towards the end of the collection, we return to the poet’s mother in “MY MOTHER IS A GARDEN.”  He writes:

Before my birth, she is acquired by the United States—

coerced by the American zodiac dream, she fled to Los Angeles—

decades later, she still withholds from speaking English and

only fertile names of flowers have taken root. She is luminous.

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Em Norton is a queer poet living in Toronto. Previously, Em’s work has been published by Room Magazine, Xtra Magazine, and Bottlecap Press. You can read more of Em’s work at emnortonwrites.com.