Description:
Feed the Beast by Pádraig Ó Tuama features poems which meditate on sexuality and religion. This breathtaking book charts the landscape into-and out of-the world of "gay cure" and reparative therapy.
Brief description: Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet and theologian from Ireland. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland, The Harvard Review, Gutter and the Academy of American Poets, as well as being featured on national broadcasters in Ireland, the USA, Australia, the UK and New Zealand. His podcast Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios has been downloaded over six million times, the compnion book Poetry Unbound is available from Canongate/WW Norton.
Review Quotes:
The poems in Pádraig Ó Tuama's Feed the Beast loom large with a kind of broad-stroke swagger only this poet can render through language that is as tender as it is animated: "I've been swimming round here for a while now/and while I've never touched the ocean floor, /I've tried." This book is unashamed about poetry's relationship to the spirit...I would go as far as saying this book is one way we know poetry is prayer.
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Tender, heartbreaking, and lyric; an excavation into exile and exorcism as it applies to gay men. This is a book of griefs and resurrection. Beautiful.
- Joelle Taylor, C+nto & Othered Poems