Book overview
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
