Brutal Companion

A Journey Through Love, Loss, and Identity

Greetings, friends, readers, and poetry enthusiasts; I am thrilled to reveal the cover of my forthcoming collection, Brutal Companion.

Brutal Companion is out October 15, 2024, from Barrow Street Press
PRE-ORDER BRUTAL COMPANION HERE

As I sit and stare at the cover of Brutal Companion, I am filled with a mixture of excitement and unease. The neon green image, set against a black backdrop, sets the stage for the circumstances that unfold within these pages. In 2016, not long after making Chicago home, I was diagnosed with HIV. This disclosure is made with the intention of fostering transparency and understanding of the circumstances that precipitated many of these poems. I deeply appreciate your respect for my privacy and your unwavering support over the years. Your support has been integral to my journey as a poet.

The origins of Brutal Companion are in Lubbock, Texas, where I was a graduate student until 2012. After leaving graduate school, I had a new manuscript of poems from my dissertation. Still, I did not intend to do anything with them because they had been written at a time when I was reading philosophy and art theory and believed them to be too abstract. I put the poems away.

Before moving to Illinois, I was given a copy of The Clerk's Tale by Spencer Reece by a friend in my literature program. In the introduction, Nobel Laureate Louise Glück writes he "has something of Bishop's passion for detail, her scrupulousness, and something of Lowell's genius for fixing character in gesture…the wild, inexhaustible fertility of his comparisons is, though, without antecedent." I was immediately drawn to Reece’s incisive observations and sharp wit.

In 2015,  I found Spencer Reece on Facebook and sent him a message. He wrote back, and soon we were talking on the phone about poetry, service, and love. We spent years getting to know each other. Spencer taught me the power of vulnerability. He is a priest, and though I've been Agnostic longer than the Catholic I was raised to be, Spencer renewed my faith in spirituality and love. However, I had to learn to love myself first. This journey of self-discovery, of learning to love oneself, is a central theme in my poetry.

I am the son of a single immigrant mother who fled from Costa Rica and raised my two older siblings and me in Los Angeles. At three years old, we moved to Bell, a city of 2.5 square miles southeast of Los Angeles. Over the next sixteen years, we moved at least ten times from one side of the city to another, remaking friends along the way.

As an adult, I have led a fragmented life. Since the publication of my debut collection, Next Extinct Mammal, in 2011, I have moved ten times and had probably as many lovers. Uncertainty has always been a part of me, but my concerns in the poetry I've been writing recently have shifted to broader concerns of love, human rights, and the environment.

Subsequently, these poems are not confessional; they are drawn from cultural and historical events and firsthand observations. Early iterations of these poems appeared in the chapbook Revelations, and a handful of the poems are from my dissertation. Brutal Companion represents not just years of work, but as Maya Angelou said, it is the sum total of everything. The cover image represents the fragmented lives lived through these poems.

Brutal Companion is out October 15, 2024, from Barrow Street Press
PRE-ORDER BRUTAL COMPANION HERE

Brutal Companion is divided into three sections that serve as a path for the reader. The first section reflects on the emotions associated with losing someone close and the inevitable acceptance of the natural order of things. The second section is more existential on the destructive nature of conflict and violence between humans and the environment. The concluding section focuses on identity and transformation, coming to terms with mortality.

Over the years, I have found greater certainty in my life, allowing me to focus on love and joy in the work I want to do. Brutal Companion was developed in a variety of artistic and scholarly communities across the country. I have had the privilege to meet many of you who have welcomed me into your communities and spaces in person and online. To all of you, I send my love and gratitude. It took many of you to bring me to this moment. Thank you.

Are you interested in collaborating?

Let me know if you'd like to be a part of this publication with an interview, review, or event. Your support and engagement are not just valued; you are vital to the success of this project. I am eager to share this journey with you and receive your thoughts.

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS

• August 24: Library of Congress National Book Festival

• September 7-8: Printer’s Row Lit Festival

• October 23: LitQuake at Grace Cathedral

• November 2: The LGBT Community Center, BGSQD

• November 4: KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series

• November 16: Volumes Bookcafe

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Brutal Companion is out October 15, 2024, from Barrow Street Press

PRE-ORDER BRUTAL COMPANION HERE

Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about the fact of longing: “You slowly fade/behind a sugar maple, branches like scarecrows waving goodbye.” He manages this beauty with poetry that is so pure that I am always left gagging at even the slightest move and smallest decision in each line (for instance, “above the black milk of Lake Michigan”).  These poems are a stunningly melancholic look at love and its eternality. 

—Jericho Brown

Brutal Companion is lush, personal, and, at turns, both sorrowful and full of praise for the world. Quesada’s book contains parallel realities made vivid through ekphrastic poetry and the personal punctured by grief, and moments of sublime beauty. This book does not flinch, it rises up to exalt love and queerness and to celebrate the erotic and moments of living before loss. This is a writer who relishes art with dazzling language and a tender heart. I did not want to stop reading, and when I did, it made me look at the world with more intention and care.

—Paul Hlava Ceballos

An offering, both seductive and intoxicating, Brutal Companion forms a timeline, a fragmented microcosm of the history of the world and a man in it. Voluptuous and visceral, Quesada captures, with such tenderness, the brutality of the world’s ability to knowingly and unknowingly harm itself, capturing both the temporary high and the lingering ache of it all. With precisions, Quesada’s pen distills the brokenness and delivers a stillness where, in this “...orchard of undress… Humans are wondrous… (and) the sun is far from rising.” 

—Laurie Ann Guerrero

Quesada’s superb new book gives solace and lulls the loneliness he finds in the world. Like his forebear Fernando Pessoa, who called his poetry “a secret orchestra,” Quesada writes: “the body is a charming instrument.” His score made from the body in equal measure with the soul, a body whose intimacy creates its own melody with staccato codas. Desire, flat and sharp, makes the sweet tune I hummed long after I put down these frank and decorous poems. What brutal, vulnerable, beautiful music we have now: Brutal Companion, a companion to keep.

—Spencer Reece

Brutal Companion is out October 15, 2024, from Barrow Street Press
PRE-ORDER BRUTAL COMPANION HERE