Beforelight

Gellman’s affecting debut is filled with heartbreak, transformation, and light. Family members (mother, father, younger brother, an imagined sister) appear throughout, along with lost boys and men, some of whom are childhood friends and others intimate partners. In “Tyler,” the speaker is one of many tough boys “filling another boy’s bedroom/ with the softer parts of himself.” Metaphors bring humans and nature into sharper focus, as in “Mother, After the Hurricane” (“there’s hardly a stammer in the sky”) and “St. Timothy’s School, 1975” (“our loneliness is a lineage heavy as a heatwave,/ inevitable as a blizzard”). The struggle to grow is infused with longing and an apparent urge to make a difficult past nostalgic. By the book’s final poem, “Alpenglow,” the speaker says he is “not turning/ from loneliness, really, just learning/ to treat it as wind, to make a meager meal// of what boyhood of lacquer and moody/ I clung to.” In these beautiful poems, Gellman resists and airs the sources of his pain, finding a way to accept who he was and who he has become. (Apr.)