Overview

O, The Oprah Magazine, ""42 Best LGBTQ Books of 2020"" NPR's Favorite Books of 2020 Mark Bibbins turns his candid eye to the American AIDS crisis. With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred- amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, ""For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say."" And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing-through both joy and grief-to wonder.

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9781556595776

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"""A book-length elegy to a beloved who died of AIDS in 1992, Bibbins’s spare, crystalline sequence is also a powerful memorial for 'a generation fully / accustomed to being struck down.'” —The New York Times ""Keenly weaves together fragments of memory and metaphor with Bibbins's signature wit, touched with a bold sense of loss."" —Maya Phillips for The New York Times ""Achingly beautiful... The scope of this darkly humorous and always tender book paints a portrait of grief as a fellow traveler that morphs but loses none of its power over time—a power readers will be lucky to experience."" —Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Bibbins's fourth and best book... Poems that are at once profoundly touching and bitterly resolved."" —NPR ""With humility, anger, and honesty, 13th Balloon carries its questions across those great distances... In Bibbins's wise possession, a letter to the lost becomes a living testament: to the repeated attempts and failures we make to understand how we might go on, and to our going on."" —American Poetry Review ""Devastating and beautiful... Bibbins precisely observes his grief in sharp, crisp lines and details."" —The Week ""The stark, unfussy lines with their steep enjambments make 13th Balloon feel like something rescued from time... [T]he book is as raw and shocking as the events it describes must have felt, nearly 30 years ago. The list of exceptional books wrenched from the mouth of the plague is deep, but Bibbins has just added another essential one to it."" —John Freeman, Literary Hub ""...When a lover dies, some part of ourselves also drifts away along with language, memory and feeling, and this is perhaps the crux of Bibbins’ beautiful and powerful book. The book is essentially one shifting elision of memory, thought, anecdote, and ephemera, explored from numerous vantage points. Always in sight is that tender specter of grief released, vivid against a bright void... It is full of humor, wit and pathos. And it exhibits an amazing lyric facility that permits Bibbins his return to metaphor, irony, tension and paradox, all blended in a metaphysical unity."" —Lambda Literary ""An elegy that is as delicate as it is courageous, fleeting and kinetic as it is true.""—The Rumpus ""Bibbins' elegiac new book, 13th Balloon, is a single novella-length poem, accessible to even poetry-averse readers. Like its namesake, the verse floats across time and space, moving gracefully from the present to the past."" —Passport Magazine ""Anybody who’d like to observe a contemporary poet having a go at producing The Real Thing, should get a hold of this book. It’s that rare deal: a book you know you’re not done with when you close it.""—RHINO ""Bibbins is guided by memory and longing and the true wish to have back some of what’s gone. This speaker, who is as vulnerable as language allows, knows these poems have arrived too late: 'I have only language for you now/ a language/ that morphs like a virus/ to elude to survive to connect,' Alas, Bibbins seems to have anticipated this year’s seasons of grief, and he is kind company."" —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR"

A book-length elegy to a beloved who died of AIDS in 1992, Bibbins's spare, crystalline sequence is also a powerful memorial for 'a generation fully / accustomed to being struck down.' --The New York Times Keenly weaves together fragments of memory and metaphor with Bibbins's signature wit, touched with a bold sense of loss. --Maya Phillips for The New York Times Achingly beautiful... The scope of this darkly humorous and always tender book paints a portrait of grief as a fellow traveler that morphs but loses none of its power over time--a power readers will be lucky to experience. --Publishers Weekly, starred review Bibbins's fourth and best book... Poems that are at once profoundly touching and bitterly resolved. --NPR With humility, anger, and honesty, 13th Balloon carries its questions across those great distances... In Bibbins's wise possession, a letter to the lost becomes a living testament: to the repeated attempts and failures we make to understand how we might go on, and to our going on. --American Poetry Review Devastating and beautiful... Bibbins precisely observes his grief in sharp, crisp lines and details. --The Week The stark, unfussy lines with their steep enjambments make 13th Balloon feel like something rescued from time... [T]he book is as raw and shocking as the events it describes must have felt, nearly 30 years ago. The list of exceptional books wrenched from the mouth of the plague is deep, but Bibbins has just added another essential one to it. --John Freeman, Literary Hub ...When a lover dies, some part of ourselves also drifts away along with language, memory and feeling, and this is perhaps the crux of Bibbins' beautiful and powerful book. The book is essentially one shifting elision of memory, thought, anecdote, and ephemera, explored from numerous vantage points. Always in sight is that tender specter of grief released, vivid against a bright void... It is full of humor, wit and pathos. And it exhibits an amazing lyric facility that permits Bibbins his return to metaphor, irony, tension and paradox, all blended in a metaphysical unity. --Lambda Literary An elegy that is as delicate as it is courageous, fleeting and kinetic as it is true.--The Rumpus Bibbins' elegiac new book, 13th Balloon, is a single novella-length poem, accessible to even poetry-averse readers. Like its namesake, the verse floats across time and space, moving gracefully from the present to the past. --Passport Magazine Anybody who'd like to observe a contemporary poet having a go at producing The Real Thing, should get a hold of this book. It's that rare deal: a book you know you're not done with when you close it.--RHINO Bibbins is guided by memory and longing and the true wish to have back some of what's gone. This speaker, who is as vulnerable as language allows, knows these poems have arrived too late: 'I have only language for you now/ a language/ that morphs like a virus/ to elude to survive to connect, ' Alas, Bibbins seems to have anticipated this year's seasons of grief, and he is kind company. --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

A book-length elegy to a beloved who died of AIDS in 1992, Bibbins's spare, crystalline sequence is also a powerful memorial for 'a generation fully / accustomed to being struck down.' --The New York Times Keenly weaves together fragments of memory and metaphor with Bibbins's signature wit, touched with a bold sense of loss. --Maya Phillips for The New York Times Achingly beautiful... The scope of this darkly humorous and always tender book paints a portrait of grief as a fellow traveler that morphs but loses none of its power over time--a power readers will be lucky to experience. --Publishers Weekly, starred review Bibbins's fourth and best book... Poems that are at once profoundly touching and bitterly resolved. --NPR With humility, anger, and honesty, 13th Balloon carries its questions across those great distances... In Bibbins's wise possession, a letter to the lost becomes a living testament: to the repeated attempts and failures we make to understand how we might go on, and to our going on. --American Poetry Review Devastating and beautiful... Bibbins precisely observes his grief in sharp, crisp lines and details. --The Week The stark, unfussy lines with their steep enjambments make 13th Balloon feel like something rescued from time... [T]he book is as raw and shocking as the events it describes must have felt, nearly 30 years ago. The list of exceptional books wrenched from the mouth of the plague is deep, but Bibbins has just added another essential one to it. --John Freeman, Literary Hub ...When a lover dies, some part of ourselves also drifts away along with language, memory and feeling, and this is perhaps the crux of Bibbins' beautiful and powerful book. The book is essentially one shifting elision of memory, thought, anecdote, and ephemera, explored from numerous vantage points. Always in sight is that tender specter of grief released, vivid against a bright void... It is full of humor, wit and pathos. And it exhibits an amazing lyric facility that permits Bibbins his return to metaphor, irony, tension and paradox, all blended in a metaphysical unity. --Lambda Literary An elegy that is as delicate as it is courageous, fleeting and kinetic as it is true. --The Rumpus Bibbins' elegiac new book, 13th Balloon, is a single novella-length poem, accessible to even poetry-averse readers. Like its namesake, the verse floats across time and space, moving gracefully from the present to the past. --Passport Magazine Anybody who'd like to observe a contemporary poet having a go at producing The Real Thing, should get a hold of this book. It's that rare deal: a book you know you're not done with when you close it. --RHINO Bibbins is guided by memory and longing and the true wish to have back some of what's gone. This speaker, who is as vulnerable as language allows, knows these poems have arrived too late: 'I have only language for you now/ a language/ that morphs like a virus/ to elude to survive to connect, ' Alas, Bibbins seems to have anticipated this year's seasons of grief, and he is kind company. --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

These poems are made powerful by the bitter energy of a voice not silenced but made to sound ridiculous in a political culture in which disagreement with the government is unpatriotic. --Publishers Weekly [Bibbins's] Ginsu wit and knack for outing the demons under our skin argue for cynicism as a form of enlightenment, as saving grace, or at least as the last weapon in the depleted arsenal of sanity. Implying that the consequence of acquiescence is the privatizing of public response, his associative, oblique technique becomes the perfect tableturning weapon against the culture of mass distraction. --Boston Review The book's a little crazy, packed with air quotes and brackets, jokes and condemnations, forms that explode across the page. Crazily enough, it's also packed with truth. --NPR These associative poems have a frenetic energy and wide range--both in form and subject, dexterously combining the levity of pop culture with deadly serious political commentary about the War on Terror, rape culture, and capitalism. --American Poets

Author Information

Mark Bibbins was born in 1968 in Albany, New York. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School, and is the author of four books of poems, including They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full, The Dance of No Hard Feelings, and Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine. In addition to teaching, Bibbins is the editor of the poetry section of The Awl, a web magazine. He lives in New York City.

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