The San Francisco Poem

Summary

An epic poem written to a singular American city, unfolding in step with a burgeoning love story

No city bears the marks of the vertiginous change that has taken place in American life like San Francisco. Amid its palimpsest of indelible history and strange artifacts of the future flicker scenes from the lives of its people—and The San Francisco poem is an homage to the ecstasies and vagaries of those stories. Unfurling over the course of a year, every poem representing one day, this collection has the intimacy of a love letter while preserving the epic sweep of its subject. Threading San Francisco’s unique story of flux through larger stories of climate change, the housing crisis, the opioid epidemic, and other kinds of political violence and confusion that characterize our time, The San Francisco Poem follows two people who fall in love, almost to their surprise—a journey of queer desire, disintegration, and a blossoming commitment to each other and to the place they call home.

Ranging across a city bathhouse, nights of violent illness, the humiliations of poverty, hiding in the bathroom from relatives, battling roaches, a drive-by shooting, Alcatraz, occult paroxysms, and travel to smalltown California, rural Kansas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, this book of poetry riffs on various forms—memoir, novella, documentary, daybook, haiku, verse, cinema, the to-do list—as it sings its complicated paean to a great American city.