Martin Pousson takes the hard-earned wisdom he's gained as an American outsider three times over—Southerner, Cajun, and queer—and lets it dissolve on his burning poet's tongue.

This cycle of short, but far from syrupy sweet, poems begins with a fey boy's odyssey through the labyrinths of masculinity, race, desire, and family tragedy in his childhood home of Louisiana. It follows the man as he escapes the South to find himself an outsider again, only this time in the gay ghettos of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It ends with the man reborn a fierce writer who embraces No Place as his home and himself and other enlightened misfits as his family.

Read select poems from Sugar at Velvet Mafia.

Author Photograph by Peter Murdock

Martin Pousson was born and raised in the bayouland of Louisiana. His first novel, No Place, Louisiana, was a finalist for the John Gardner Award in Fiction and has been translated into French. He has taught in the writing program at Columbia University in New York and at 826 Valencia in San Francisco. He now teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he lives. This is his first collection of poems.