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Bullets & Butterflies:
queer spoken word poetry
an anthology edited by
Emanuel Xavier
Praise for Bullets & Butterflies
"If you're not familiar with the art of spoken word, this is your chance to catch up with some of the form's shining stars. Bullets & Butterflies showcases the creative talents of queer spoken-word artists who set life to their own distinct rhythm. Though the poems were intended to be performed aloud, their transition to the page proves seamless as each entry captures a raw essence that helps them speak for themselves. That's the power of words."
—Denvil Saine,
HX Magazine
"When spoken word became the trend du jour for wannabe intellectuals and aspiring bohemians, a frightening new wave of redundant, vacuous poetry focused not on honesty of emotion, but on clever rhyme patterns, took center stage. Bullets and Butterflies restores some much-needed honesty to the genre with its poignant poems, which touch upon subjects such as love, identity, ruptured families, revolution, death, rejection and bigotry. Although not all of the poems dazzle, there are no space-fillers here. Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian poet Emmanuel Xavier hits high notes with "A Simple Poem" and "Legendary," but it's Travis Montez and Staceyann Chin who steal the show with their viscerally visual accounts."
—Celia San Miguel,
New York Post—Tempo
"Xavier's deft editing results in a passionate read. Bullets & Butterfiles contains queer spoken word poetry featuring the likes of Regie Cabico, Alix Olson, Daphne Gottlieb, and Staceyann Chin. If you love spoken word, you won't want to miss this one!"
—Prideindex.com
"Round out your queer canon with a couple of cannonballs fired straight from the militant front lines of urban spoken word expression. All the poets you know (or will soon enough) are anthologized in this potent collection. Led by Puerto Rican wordsmith Emanuel Xavier, the rough riders of the new poetic frontier are blazing in their saddles here, spittin' the kind of politically-charged-fire-tempered-with-humor that makes us love these bad boys so."
—Next Magazine
"After years of trolling from the West Side piers to the poetry clubs of the Lower East Side and finally, to LOGO feature film The Ski Trip, Nuyorican poet Emanuel Xavier celebrates the queer spoken word community with Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry.
"Xavier gathered together a diverse group of queer poets whose work is spit from the stages rather than chained by the pages. The anthology includes those suckled on the spoken word, like Celena Glenn and Daphne Gottlieb, and latecomers like Horehound Stillpoint and Marty McConnell. Though the poets are from diverse backgrounds, from East African Indian Shailja Patel to Nashville-born Travis Montez, their poetry shares certain themes, such as coming out, turning a critical eye to American under the Bush Administration, and a fascination with pop culture.
"The work of these 13 poets celebrates the diversity of the queer experience. Stillpoint and Xavier celebrate being openly gay and proudly sexual, and you can track the path in both of their work toward finding a more satisfying existence, something more enduring than a quick hook-up.
"Shane Luitjens, a white boy from the Midwest, and Montez, an African-American man from the South, explore bisexuality in their work, plus an idea that poetry is a tool best used to force a conversation. Luitjens allows the closet to become an ironic metaphor in 'Hey Straight Boy (I'll Fuck Ya).' Montez finds in his lover the same shame his father had in 'Time Piece,' writing, 'I tell him that my soul has finally come out to play/ but he/ is a homophobic homosexual/and tells me that I am too gay.'
"Filipino poet Regie Cabico challenges the 'best Geisha,' 'rice queen' stereotypes, and demands to be loved for who he is: A queen named for a king. He demands it of his lovers, and in 'Coming Out Duet,' demands it of his parents, writing, 'As soon as my poetry came out/ I CAME OUT.... here are my poems...love them.' Cabico also revels in pop culture with his open letters to Filipino celebrities Lea Salonga and Tia Carrere, in which he takes them to task for perpetuating Asian stereotypes.
"Patel's work investigates this cultural divide, especially in the poem about her father, who speaks five languages, but finds that English is the only one that matters for 'white men/who think their flat cold spiky words/make the only reality.' Patel writes poems about figures like Bibi Sardar, an Afghani woman whose husband and seven kids were killed by U.S. air strikes on Kabul in October 2001, and the South Korean waitress beaten to death by a U.S. soldier for refusing sex.
"The rage she feels is echoed in the works of Glenn in her poem 'We Rub Nations Like Catholic Priests Rub the Children of Their Flock,' and in the dense poetry of Trinidad-born Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, whose work is seriously confrontational.
"In contrast is Jamaican-born Staceyann Chin, who like Boyce-Taylor iconizes lesbian writer Audre Lorde, but rather than hoarding her anger, uses it to elevate, educate and entertain. You can see in Chin's well-crafted work why she is a hard-hitter, having made it to Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry.
"This star power is also evident in lesbian poetry slam poster girl Alix Olson's work. Even on the page, her rhythm is infectious.
"The poets celebrate the modern gay experience, for better or worse. Xavier gives a shout out to drag legend Pepper LaBeija. His The Ski Trip co-star and writer Maurice Jamal remembers slain New Jersey lesbian Sakia Gunn. Montez writes of the father who killed his gay son and wrote Number One Gay Nigger across his skull.
"Olson writes 'If this is a movement we're making, / we have got to get moving,' and a few pages later, Jamal salutes the 'support group/ roundtable discussion/ open forum/ conference call/ community task force/ 12-steppin' folks/ on the front lines.'
"Almost every poet in Bullets & Butterflies takes the Bush Administration to task. Stillpoint writes, 'Thank you, Presidential Prick,' while Glenn says, 'if I had balls/ the White House could suck them.' Olsen bemoans that 'America's On Sale' and remembers how, after 9/11, 'brown deli owners scrambled for flag mercy.' McConnell questions, 'if a man can disable a flight staff with a pair/of blunt tweezers, does he need the tweezers?' while Montez remembers how 'on a Tuesday in September/ words are hummingbirds/ no longer in my mouth.' Boyce-Taylor rages against everything, from 'bush liars wars' to Starbucks.
"The poets in Bullets & Butterflies vary in terms of style and talent, but all celebrate what it is to be queer and outspoken in today's world. For those familiar with the slam poetry scene in New York and San Francisco, this anthology is a chance to see on page poems that they heretofore have only heard over steaming mugs of coffee. For those new to queer spoken word poetry, this anthology is a window into a world where having a big mouth and plenty to say is an asset rather than a liability."
—Winnie McCroy, Edge Boston
"Bullets & Butterflies is an aptly titled anthology edited by poet
Emanuel Xavier. At once fierce and viscerally exacting of the
complexities of queer identities, the anthology also presents poetry
that is heartbreaking, fragile, and vibrant. What is more, the
anthology is comprised of poetry that resists the restraints of the
page, that yearns to breathe in the open air, that refuses to die when
spoken. These poems flood the channels of the body, swelling the heart
with understanding because of their acute depictions of gay and
lesbian life in 21st century America. And as a black, gay poet myself,
whose own poetry tends to be married strictly to the page, I am
delighted by how the poems in Bullets & Butterflies bring the oral
tradition of poetry back into the mainstream. I am delighted by the
crafting of these poems, which are influenced by lives lived on the
streets, in the ghettoes. However, this collection is anything but an
album of ghettoized poetry.
"Although editor Emanuel Xavier's assertion that spoken word poetry
"vibrantly [cascades] beyond sexuality and into the political," these poems do so without comprising aesthetic beauty for dogmatic
political agenda. Yes, there are highly energized poems that soar from
the page in a maelstrom of activity, and may be confused as
politically charged; they do so, however, in a manner as colorfully
(exquisitely) as the rainbow flag which symbolizes queer culture. For
example, in "confessions of a jerk-off retard," poet Horehound
Stillpoint writes:
My first orgasm was with a friend
He called it milking the cow
One hand tickled while the other went to work
We were what would now be called: goal-oriented
Our eyes glazed and intense as revolutionaries
Me being the latchkey kid, he came over Monday through Friday
We had our routine, terrifying and necessary
and transcendent as milking a cow could be
"Words such as "goal-oriented" and "revolutionaries" are juxtaposed
with "romantic" and "transcendent"-which the poem certainly is. Even
when the poem continues on to depict a very primal orgasmic
experience, a personal experience that, as poet Adrienne Rich would
state, is a political one because it is personal, the tenderness and
control, acuity in the language suggests something more profoundly
human. Furthermore, there is an emotional resonance that, for all the
poem's rawness, will ring so true for the reader.
"I believe this is what Xavier may have meant when he stated that
spoken word poetry, this poetry, "vibrantly [cascades] beyond
sexuality and into the political." These poems are personal
reflections of myriad lives in which most queer folks can see their
own lives gazing back at them as clearly as a shimmering pond casting
back a rising sun. What is more, not since the poetry of Essex
Hemphill and his peers have I found such invigorating and insightful
poetry. For example in Celena Glenn's poem, "abner louima," she
writes:
we teach our kids to lie
ass up and kiss the dick
of the son of the boss
son of a bitch named Lassie
leashed neck
tied in satin
patterned in blueprints
portraying how to get black and brown thumbprints on the record
enrolling them in the auction
blocks of public housing
of welfare recipients
"Although this poem certainly toes the line of the political, it is, in
a Hemphillian way, lessened by the poet's crafting of the poem-how
perfectly the poet breaks each line, for example. The line reading
"enrolling them in the auction / blocks of public housing" is doubly
rewarding because it exacts not only the current abundance of "welfare
recipients" living in ghettoes, but also it suggests the history of
blacks having been relegated to the margins, the ghettoes of society.
And, for me, because Glenn so carefully crafts the poem in this way,
it becomes less a diatribe about historical suffering, and more a poem
that enlightens the world about a very dire cultural imbalance.
"I have extracted only two poems from this fine book; however, all the
poems in this anthology, in some way or other, are complexly entangled
when it comes to writing about what it is to be American and queer.
And what I admire most about the anthology is that the form, that is
the spoken word form, offers a space in which these poets can share
their experiences with readers in a way that isn't alienating, that
may leave the reader clamoring for the nearest microphone, waiting for
these potent words to explode the air."
—D. Antwan Stewart,
Lambda Book Report
"If Suspects Thoughts Press has any reason for existing, it is to publish work by the likes of Emanuel Xavier. In 1997, Xavier made his way into the literary map when he won the Nuyorican Poet's Café Grand Slam Championship. Many of these prize-winning poems found their way between the pages of Xavier's first book, Pier Queen (Pier Queen Productions). Xavier has since found a new literary home with Suspect Thoughts, which published Americano, Xavier's second collection of poems. The product of years of experience, the poems in Americano were influenced by the horrors of 9-11-2001 as well as by the singular experiences of being half-Ecuadorian, half-Nuyorican; a victim of sexual abuse; a former hustler and drug-dealer; and 100% a poet. The 35 poems that fill the pages of Americano deal with topics that we are "not supposed" to talk about: religion and politics; violence and race and sex - simply the stuff that great poems are made of.
"Emanuel Xavier is one of many poets who sharpened his or her craft in spoken word readings and poetry slams. Many of those poets were/are queer; and Xavier honors them by editing the anthology Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry . "Spoken word poetry has been both greatly criticized and widely celebrated," Xavier tells us. "As spoken word artists, we have little interest in pretending to come across as academics. Many of us have developed our crafts on the streets or in underground cafes or stumbled upon poetry by sheer accident...Queer voices have been at the vanguard of the spoken word rebellion, from the very beginning, vibrantly cascading beyond sexuality and into the political." In addition to poesy by Xavier himself, Bullets & Butterflies features poems by Horehound Stillpoint, Celena Glenn, Alix Olson, Maurice Jamal. Travis Montes and Staceyann Chin, just to name a few. Though nothing can take the place of witnessing a spoken word performance, reading the poems in this book is the next-best thing."
—Jesse Monteagudo,
The Weekly News
release: February 2005
poetry/queer fiction
softcover, 5.5X8.5
216 pages, $16.95
0-9746388-5-4
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