New sonnet collection inspired by queer love and chemistry
‘Periodic Boyfriends’By Drew Pisarrac.2023, Capturing Fire Press$20/152 pages If you’d told me that I’d get as much of a kick out of sonnets inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements as Cole Porter got from Champagne, I would have thought you’d had too much bubbly.
Until I read “Periodic Boyfriends,” queer poet and writer Drew Pisarra’s intriguing new poetry collection. With his sleight of hand, Pisarra puts all of us, chemistry lovers and naysayers, under his spell. “Periodic Boyfriends” is a collection of sonnets inspired by queer love and the periodic table of elements.
Pisarra writes sonnets that Shakespeare, who some scholars think was queer, would, I’d wager, have enjoyed reading with his BFFs.
Each of the witty, sometimes poignant, nearly always captivating, sonnets in “Periodic Boyfriends” is titled with the name for an element in the periodic table (such as the poems titled “Hydrogen,” “Boron,” “Lithium” and “Palladium”).
