The question is not why my brother had to die. The question is how do I save him?
Exploring the AIDS crisis, space colonization, and earth-bound lesbianism, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE uses poetry, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and crip queer politics to ask: what if a generation of gay men didn't die of AIDS? What if their exile was actually escape? And what happened to the family they left behind?
Told from the perspective of a sister mourning her brother-one she never knew-Sara Youngblood Gregory's startling debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to anger and love, sex and sickness, grief and family.
Sara Youngblood Gregory's DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is a book that understands the impossible math of queer time: how we inherit a crisis we did not survive, how we live in the after without ever being "after" it. It refuses the lie that PrEP has made us safe from history. Instead, it asks what it means to desire, to grieve, to build a body and a future in the long shadow of AIDS, in a family that still breathes and remembers.
-Bryan Borland, editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry
In DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, Sara Youngblood Gregory deftly grapples with queer and feminist histories refracting them through personal experience and poetic experiments. It is a marvel to behold.
-Julie R. Enszer, author of Pinko Commie Dyke
Industry Reviews
Sara Youngblood Gregory's stunning debut, DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, is a testament to resilience. These poems-structured with astonishing skill and arranged with profound wisdom-delve into the sexual and medical, grief and family, and challenge the lingering glooms and impulses of afflictions. To read this work is to witness a writer tackling difficult subjects with breathtaking bravery and poetic governance.
-Vi Khi Nao, author of My Ardent Love for the Pencil
In this beautiful and inventive project, Sara Youngblood Gregory has reimagined a queer AIDS archive and gifted us with one of the best things queer literature can offer-an alternative story to the dominant narrative-one that imagines us surviving into a future that overlays our grief with defiant, erotic exuberance.
-Keiko Lane, author of Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art
DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is a vibrantly imagined world of a very real grief. In this triumph of a debut, Sara Youngblood Gregory sings us a refraining eulogy-a eulogy of both individual and communal loss. In each poem, I feel awash in the holiness of our queer ancestral kin. In each poem, I am lost in Youngblood Gregory's lyricism which asks, again and again, where all of our dead have gone. I am found when Youngblood Gregory writes: what it means to be human changes. What an enduring gift, that it changes, and that we have poets like Youngblood Gregory to help us along the way.
-Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Winter of Worship
