Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Timothy Dyke's ATOMS OF MUSES is a book that took great courage to compose. Dyke confronts the issue of gay teen suicide in a sequence of prose poems. While the poet clings to some need for chronology, these are the meditations of an older gay man, late to come out of the closet, who thinks back on his days eating Cheetos in front of the TV in Nixon-era suburbia. He rolls out a cast of characters from those days, including a (closeted) boy who became a dentist, then killed himself. Some of these characters are persons, some allegorical fictions, like The Homosexual Agenda, The Woman in the Burka, and The Maple Tree, over which a noose is thrown by a teenage boy. Illustrated with great sensitivity by Jeff Sanner, this is a book for and about our time. Wallace Stevens noted that poetry can kill a man. This book may save one.
