Or, closer to home, Omar Sakr’s Non-Essential Work (2023) offers the reader a number of treatises ‘On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno’’. Dante itself is reworking the bible, inserting himself and the Roman poet Virgil into an exploration of Hell; his circles of hell are actually the centrepiece of Vuong’s ‘seventh circle of Earth’. In one ‘On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s ‘Inferno’’, Sakr begins by telling us that ‘I lift him out, whole and perfect. / Said told me he would be here, chained by Dante / To the eighth circle of hell, bettered only from the devil himself’. It is a labour of love and faith, to extract Muhammad from Dante’s tome and expel him from Hell and its fires. These poems recur throughout the collection, reminding the reader that finding the Prophet is unendingly recurring, even recursive. What a task, to not only take that journey back to the past but also to find something there, and then to transform it into verse.
Mythology is full of unreal creatures and their anger, desire, weeping. Constantly turning and transforming, made real through our shared imagination. A tempting space of mediation for the queer subject, whether that’s fetching a figure from a lost tale or an openly queer poet infusing their work with their perspective of moving through the world. These are explorations that can take the sense of Other that comes with being marginalised and infusing it with a sort of mystique – and then find a place in the traditions and playgrounds of poetry.
When I first finished Autobiography of Red and began writing this piece, it was autumn, the leaves – like parts of my life – on the precipice of spinning, changing. On my phone there is an image of my friend at the park, head down with the sky behind a rich blue and pink, the greens still so greens, the whole thing all pastel like a picture book. We had met up to give me a chance to begin sorting my thoughts on this book into words. That weekend, I was listening to ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’ by Wolf Alice on repeat; I do this sometimes, listen to Ellie Rowsell sing, ‘I see the signs of a lifetime, you ‘til I die’. Desire is an all-engulfing thing, and it does often feel monstrous. In Autobiography of Red, Carson uses mythology, uses the past, to explore queer monstrosity, trauma, survival—all levied through the viscosity of contemporary poetry.
I write now at the turn of a new year. No matter what happens, the time passes; not everything goes with it. Autobiography of Red ends not with any particular rise and release of tension, and certainly not with death or catharsis. Geryon doesn’t use his wings, but he does receive permission to. Rather, the poem closes on an almost mundane scene, with Geryon and Herakles and Ancash watching fire flicker in a bakery oven.
We are amazing beings, Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire. And now time is rushing towards them where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back. (146)
