proxy

by R. Erica Doyle

Poetry. LGBT Studies. PROXY is an unrequited love story in prose poems, where the landscape of the beloved body becomes the windows of New York City, the deserts of North Africa, and the mangroves of the Caribbean. PROXY is a conversation with the calculus, plotting time and space against the infinite capacities of desire.

"With swagger and appetite, the poems in R. Erica Doyle's proxy reveal the costs of masking one's vulnerability. Like Arthur Rimbaud, Lucille Clifton, and Richard Siken, these poems suggest the struggle to be released from one's own depths is life's greatest adventure. PROXY asks us to perform scenarios of love and loss as if we had no other choice. Because it is difficult to resist Doyle's crisp and cannylanguage, the sum effect of this exercise is wonder."--Wendy S. Walters

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and her first book, proxy, was published by Belladonna Books in 2013. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Ploughshares, Bloom, Blithe House Quarterly and Sinister Wisdom.

She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Erica is a Cave Canem Fellow and received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. She lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Free Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You are a child pulling your lips back from your teeth in the mirror. Two fingers deep along the side of your cheeks and pull, pull, pull until you see the bones of your face, the skull that lurks behind your eyes.

You're dying. Doesn't everybody know it."

[Nov 2013] The more I re-read this, the better I like it and the more I find myself thinking about this.

[Lauren Alleyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw, dazzling and utterly brave, this book stole my breath. I devoured it in one sitting, and emerged shaken and reborn. These poems shook loose poems that were lodged inside me, and gave them wings. It's that powerful.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for my queer/trans book club in madison. a steamy read! desire desire desire. the proximal. anonymous cast of lovers as proxy for the beloved; writing as proxy for love/sex; use of second person, another proxy. here the "you" is the lover, not the beloved.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this now

[Kelly Lynn Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proxy is a collection of connected prose poems that map queer desire and sexuality. Doyle holds nothing back, and describes the sex she has with women and the occasional man in fine detail. While some might view this sort of erotic writing as crass, they are just plain wrong.

This book is an important owning of queer sex. We see depictions of straight sex on TV and in movies all the time--even in books. We are even seeing more kinky sex in this popular media, but we rarely see two women having sex, or two men having sex, of any kind, in any kind of media. It's fine to talk about LGBTQ relationships and equality, but rarely do we see frank discussions of SEX.

Doyle lays it all out in all its complex, horny glory, and she does it in a language that is fresh and perfect. It is serious but not pretentious, messy but well-crafted. I highly recommend it.

[Chaneli · Rating 4 out of 5]

there is so much in this book that i love!
relationships and the harm we do with all the layers on top of that.

[Kelly Bergin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life changing piece of work. I just think this is a must read for every queer person, every whites person, everyone with a soul and an eye for beauty, pain and passion.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enticingly-told narrative in prose poems, a love story between two women, very visceral and bodily and sexy, and what I really loved was the language. I felt like I was in a new, familiar-unfamiliar place.

"__ Fall. Be still and counter the trick you've played on your ears.__ Time is draped across the door. She calls. You made a horrible mistake. Between you the golden thread shines. It's made of blood and hope. You drag yourself along its solid length."

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Proxy in the midst of a flurry of other books, each which shared something in common, while trying to understand another piece of work altogether. It would seem to be easy to forget the Proxy in the midst of that rush, or to have instrumentalized it since I was looking for something else. But R. Erica Doyle doesn't allow us to take the work for granted. Gnarly. Sexual. Sensual. Adamant. Without apology and not needing one.

[Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

"you came to do an autopsy and at the first excision found a beating heart."

well it was beating, but it stopped.

[Sara Habein · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review appears at The Rumpus.