Boyelegy

Manual Alejandro Melendez
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:02:43 PDT

Positioned between Richard Siken’s Crush (2005) & Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), & written as a loose ode to Walt Whitman, boyelegy utilizes the forms & play of poetics to inscribe, dissect, & disseminate a singular obsession with bodies, desire, & memory that is transfixed on forming a ‘deep song’ after Federico García Lorca while threading the echoes of Mary Ruefle & Robert Hass throughout each section of the collection, itself a cycle structured as a vinyl set composed of two 7” singles & one 12” album able to be read from its beginning or its end. In its unified but fragmented structure of a single poem that can be broken down into individual pieces & vinyl sides, boyelegy is a liminal capture of how an accumulation of longing & attraction can act as an elegy that translates, celebrates, & bids goodbye to one man’s fixations & cravings within a ‘deep song’ cycle that embodies the sensorial & emotional viscera of unfinished love, of incomplete connections, & of imaginary lives as tangible & nuanced reality.