Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher
The incandescent African American writer Gary Fisher was completely unpublished when he died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 32. This volume, which includes all of Fisher’s stories and a generous selection from his journals, notebooks, and poems, will introduce readers to a tender, graphic, extravagant, and unswervingly incisive talent. In Fisher’s writings the razor-sharp rage is equalled only by the enveloping sweetness; the raw eroticism by a dazzling writerly elegance. Evocations of a...
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The incandescent African American writer Gary Fisher was completely unpublished when he died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 32. This volume, which includes all of Fisher’s stories and a generous selection from his journals, notebooks, and poems, will introduce readers to a tender, graphic, extravagant, and unswervingly incisive talent. In Fisher’s writings the razor-sharp rage is equalled only by the enveloping sweetness; the raw eroticism by a dazzling writerly elegance. Evocations of a haunting and mobile childhood are mixed in Fisher’s stories with an X-ray view of the racialized sexual vernaculars of gay San Francisco; while the journals braid together the narratives of sexual exploration and discovery, a joyous and deepening vocation as a writer, a growing intimacy with death, and an engagement with racial problematics that becomes ever more gravely and probingly imaginative.A uniquely intimate, unflinching testimony of the experience of a young, African American gay man in the AIDS emergency, Gary in Your Pocket includes an introduction by Don Belton that describes Fisher’s achievement in the context of other work by Black gay men such as Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill, and a biographical afterword by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.Library JournalThis volume of poetry, short stories, and journal entries was selected and edited by noted Duke theorist Sedgwick from notebooks Fisher kept from high school through his death from AIDS at 32. This first publication of Fisher's work evidences an extraordinary talentit is full of wit, always honest (sometimes brutally so), deeply intimate, and colored throughout with an overriding sweetness. Fisher explores the difficult and overlapping terrains of sexuality, race, and racism; the body (his relation to others and to his own changing body); and death. Fisher's journal and other writings also chronicle his growing identification as a writer and a passion for the process of writing that the reader can hardly escape. This is an important addition to the too-small body of works by African American gay men; for all libraries with gay studies collections.Karl Bryant, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Gary at the Table: An IntroductionWalking3A cat poem6Tawny7"I hope he smiles"17Picaro19Age of consent23Mo-day24Love in Prepositions26After the Box27Geese on a string32Before Sleep34"Are you smart enough for Laurie"36Red Cream Soda37End of the semester45Little thieves46Games49Four men62Arabesque63"Please, father"68Be-ing dead69Second Virginity71Cornerstore78Several Lies about Mom83From a notebook86Three Boys88Cat sense90The Villains of Necessity91Journals and Notebooks119Afterword273
\ Library JournalThis volume of poetry, short stories, and journal entries was selected and edited by noted Duke theorist Sedgwick from notebooks Fisher kept from high school through his death from AIDS at 32. This first publication of Fisher's work evidences an extraordinary talentit is full of wit, always honest (sometimes brutally so), deeply intimate, and colored throughout with an overriding sweetness. Fisher explores the difficult and overlapping terrains of sexuality, race, and racism; the body (his relation to others and to his own changing body); and death. Fisher's journal and other writings also chronicle his growing identification as a writer and a passion for the process of writing that the reader can hardly escape. This is an important addition to the too-small body of works by African American gay men; for all libraries with gay studies collections.Karl Bryant, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara\ \
