Overview

In Gay Sex, Charlie Lou Evans explodes the boundaries of body, gender, and desire in a debut chapbook that is as unflinching as it is tender. These poems move through the aftermath of trauma and the ongoing process of self-making, tracing a journey from violation and fragmentation toward reclamation, pleasure, and chosen becoming. Evans writes a body into existence-again and again-through surreal transformations, erotic imagination, and intimate encounters that blur the lines between self and other. Sex becomes not just an act, but a language: a way to unlearn harm, to rewire memory, and to imagine new forms of embodiment beyond the constraints of gender binaries and expectation. Across these poems, lovers become mirrors, collaborators, and witnesses. Queer intimacy offers both risk and refuge, allowing the speaker to untangle inherited violence and rediscover softness, connection, and agency. Even in its most visceral moments, Gay Sex is driven by a deep yearning for recognition-for a self that is not imposed, but chosen.

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9781943977987

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Reviews

""I KNEW CHARLIE back when he was just a gleam, just a whisper in a body on the way to becoming a home. I've never known someone more hopeful or resilient, or more likely to find humor at the core of cruelty and darkness. His poems reflected this. They were large and rambling and generous, and always, no matter their subject, conveyed the force and intention of embrace. While still the case, the poems in Gay Sex are even more deeply celebratory, joyous, and loving, for Charlie is no longer unhoused in his own body. Charlie is now Charlie, and Charlie is now home.""- Bob Hicok, author of Water Look Away""CHARLIE LOU EVANS' PERSONAL QUEST to reclaim his desire becomes, in these radiant and often raunchy poems, a broader appeal to embrace all that we've been taught to abhor-from the eroticism of slugs to the 'permanent blood stain in the center of the bed / where our bodies / failed to become one.' From the details of mental 'sex tapes, ' past regrets, and new erotic experiences, Evans calls forth something transcendent: a celebration not only of queer and trans beauty, but of a possible world where we are more alive, more permeable to each other. Ultimately, this book is a raw and unapologetic call to incorporate-from the Latin for 'to take into one's body'-all the lovers and selves we've called our own."" - Ryler Dustin, author of Trailer Park Psalms

Author Information

Charlie Lou Evans grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Virginia Tech, and currently lives in Bellingham, Washington. They explore gender and sexuality through poetry, and find it most fulfilling when others see themselves in their work. This is their debut chapbook.

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