Brutal Companion is a haunting and visceral collection of poems that explores themes of identity, sexuality, loss, and personal transformation. Drawing from his own experiences as a gay man, the poet delves unflinchingly into memories of desire, trauma, and self-discovery against the backdrop of an often unforgiving world. From intimate encounters and dreamlike visions to searing societal critiques, the poems paint a complex portrait of navigating life at the margins. With lyrical intensity and vivid imagery, the collection probes the brutality and beauty found in relationships with lovers, friends, family, and the self. In elegies to lost loved ones, the poet grapples with grief while celebrating the enduring power of human connection. Interwoven throughout are keen observations of a natural world that is at turns comforting and alien, a mirror for the poet's inner landscape. Deeply sensory and evocative, Brutal Companion is a fierce meditation on survival and a testament to poetry's ability to wrest meaning and resilience from even the darkest places.
Ruben Quesada is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. His forthcoming collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, is the winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize.
"Ruben Quesada's Brutal Companion is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read about the fact of longing: 'You slowly fade/behind a sugar maple, branches like scarecrows waving goodbye.' And he manages this beauty with a poetry so pure I am always left gagging at even the slightest move and smallest decision in each line (for instance, 'above the black milk of Lake Michigan'). These poems are a stunningly melancholic look at love and its eternality." — Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize Winner
"An offering, both seductive and intoxicating, Brutal Companion forms a timeline, a fragmented microcosm of the history of the world and a man in it. Voluptuous and visceral, Quesada captures, with such tenderness, the brutality of the world's ability to knowingly and unknowingly harm itself, capturing both the temporary high and the lingering ache of it all. With precisions, Quesada's pen distills the brokenness and delivers a stillness where, in this '...orchard of undress… Humans are wondrous… (and) the sun is far from rising." — Laurie Ann Guerrero
"Brutal Companion is lush, personal, and, at turns, both sorrowful and full of praise for the world. Quesada's book contains parallel realities made vivid through ekphrastic poetry, and the personal punctured by grief, and moments of sublime beauty. This book does not flinch, it rises up to exalt love and queerness and to celebrate the erotic and moments of living before loss. This is a writer who relishes art with dazzling language and a tender heart. I did not want to stop reading, and when I did, it made me look at the world with more intention and care." — Paul Hlava Ceballos
"Quesada's superb new book gives solace and lulls the loneliness he finds in the world. Like his forebear Fernando Pessoa, who called his poetry 'a secret orchestra,' Quesada writes: 'the body is a charming instrument.' His score made from the body in equal measure with the soul, a body whose intimacy creates its own melody with staccato codas. Desire, flat and sharp, makes the sweet tune I hummed long after I put down these frank and decorous poems. What brutal, vulnerable, beautiful music we have now: Brutal Companion, a companion to keep." — Spencer Reece
