reviewed on August 25, 2026
Since Bruce Snider first named the mode, the “gay rural” has become increasingly recognizable across contemporary poetry, evident not only in Snider’s own excellent work but in practitioners as variegated in their approaches as Eduardo Corral, Jenny Johnson, Jacques Rancourt, and Emily Van Kley.
Less recognizable to my eye—at least outside of the fiction of Samuel R. Delaney—has been the “gay sci-fi,” but Sara Youngblood Gregory engages the mode with enough verve and originality to make up for whatever it might lack in visibility.
I say this as an anti-genre extremist.
There may be exceptions, and I recognize that the sentiment is unfashionable, but the rise of "genre"—particularly in fiction— does happen to correspond with a noticeable decline in the intelligence of the American readership. I will await evidence to the contrary, but it seems to me that one turns to genre because one is more adept at "worldbuilding"—the rain is toxic!—than at writing realistic psychology.
In any case, Gregory is one of the exceptions.
The premise of Dead Boys in Space may be ridiculous—at the height of the Space Race, the U.S. government launches gay men with HIV to the moon, an advance-team for further colonization—but Gregory transforms potential farce into great feeling, eulogizing and re-imagining her speaker’s dead brother, whom she never knew. “I can suppose you // still alive,” she writes in the collection’s opening poem, and what follows is an extended act of memorialization as grave as it is tender. “What color are your eyes,” Gregory asks in a later prose poem:
And do you remember our mother. Do you remember the sound of our father growing up. I love them. Their silence is long. Did you ever listen for me. What happens if you never come home?
Winner of YesYes’s 2023 Pamet River Prize, Dead Boys in Space is Gregory’s first collection, but it seems the work of a far more mature writer. She manages, for instance, to evoke the perceptual and emotional immediacy of childhood without ever descending into the twee or sentimental. In a book about a dead brother, she is never maudlin. The diction is feral, the pacing exuberant, but Gregory sacrifices neither sense nor sequence.
Having said that, one shortcoming of the book is that much of its narrative premise is relayed in a screenplay form that veers unintentionally between spoof and seriousness. “An estimated 1.6 million homosexual men,” Gregory writes in the transcript dialogue of a “PROFESSOR,” “were successfully […] relocated to the Lunar Base between 1981 and 1996.” Later, our professor warns the audience that “[y]ou will be removed from this chamber if you disturb the presentation” before revealing that “what I am about to disclose is considered heresy.”
THESE MEN ARE NOT D—
[A SINGLE SHOT RINGS OUT]
[A BODY FALLING TO THE FLOOR]
Whereas Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire—a comparable book, and comparably impressive—moves by inference and elision, this poem never quite transcends its own gimmick.
But, like Gregory herself, the poem is an exception.
The other poems here, various in shape and sensibility, examine in Foucauldian ways—or Foucault crossed with Mass Effect—the discipline of bodies by means of sexuality and sickness. At the same time, Gregory’s sexual coming-of-age, as well as her adult pursuit of a kind of sexual ego-annihilation, takes place within an increasingly “sick” ecological context. “[T]he entire coast of southwest Florida chokes herself out,” she writes in “climate death but my blood runs hot.”
red tide bloats the shore and I strip off my shirt […] think AIDS in / the eighties such heatwaves of July nineteen eighty nine my mother won’t tell me if heatstroke killed my brother or the sweating gorgeous twinks […] she gasps from between my legs the only place safe to swim / now and her mouth dripping saltwater red tide fingers
Beautifully bold in design, with large title and section fonts, and with striking coloring, Dead Boys in Space also features perhaps the only poem I’ve read this year to make me say “wow” out loud. Titled “Eulogy,” it’s reproduced here in its entirety:
Thirty years
or more after
your death
my father
mentions you
and each syllable
of your name
is a pearl
spirited
up from some
precious
sinking
grief
my father’s
voice
deep-sea
apologetic
or maybe
apologia
I’m not sure
I can hear
the difference
under water
but this is not
how he says
my name
my name
is yellow grain
cracking
as it dries
the shape
of ironed clothes
in the open wind
the chirp
of car doors
locking
and
fathers
teaching
daughters
to dive
listen
there may be
a world
in which
your name
is never
again
spoken
but that
is not
this
world
As here, a kind of cosmic awe runs throughout Dead Boys in Space, a hard-won but nonetheless wondrous defiance. There is a sense in the book that great forces move among us—as when, a mere week after reading the book, I was running in Central Park and crossed paths, heading in the opposite direction, with Gregory herself. Wow.