From A-House to “Boy Beach” and back again, Provincetown Purples is my love letter to the famous Massachusetts beach town.
Provincetown Purples
From A-House to “Boy Beach” and back again, Provincetown Purples is Ryan Tracy’s love letter to the famous Massachusetts beach town. Written as a sequence of poetic vignettes, this book brings Provincetown to life through an unnamed speaker who finds himself at the center of loves, dramas, unexpected losses, and moments of pleasure and beauty that resist clear and final meaning. Under the purple skies of Tracy’s Provincetown, wafts of unknown fragrances brush up against dance parties, lists of unspoken rules, and the constant struggle to maintain relationships in a town blessed with saints and strangers. Like the cast of characters who populate these poems—drag queens, DJs, anonymous hookups, and lurkers in the dunes—each book is a treasure, produced in a limited edition of 150, handbound with original letterpress artwork on the cover. Provincetown Purples is a book to be read in dire times and a celebration of Provincetown’s continued role as one of the world’s most important centers of queer life and culture.
Published by Auntie Press.
Cover design by Leo Darling.
Hand-printed by Leo Darling at Knox College’s Keiner Letterpress Studio.
Hand binding by Leo and Juniper Darling.
Limited edition of 150 books.
Ryan Tracy’s Lines in the Shed is a gutsy follow-up to his debut collection Tender Bottoms (2022). At home in the American quotidian tradition of O’Hara, Williams, and Wright, these poems never lose sight of what matters, what’s gay, what comes up short, what we can’t live without, and what endures in the daily struggle to live in the world with strangers, family, and—perhaps the book’s most urgent heroes—friends.
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Read Poems from Lines in the Shed
Lines in the Shed
Lines in the Shed is a gutsy follow-up to Ryan Tracy’s debut collection Tender Bottoms (2022). At ninety-two pages, this book of poems takes aim at sanguine American claims to consensus, unity, and safety. Instead, Lines in the Shed offers at-close-range portraits of a social fracture, everyday paranoia, and unspoken antagonisms, major and minor. Yet Tracy’s frank appraisal of environmental and emotional crises doesn’t surrender vision to despair. At home in the American quotidian tradition of O’Hara, Williams, and Wright, these poems never lose sight of what matters, what’s gay, what comes up short, what we can’t live without, and what endures in the daily struggle to live in the world with strangers, family, and—perhaps the book’s most urgent heroes—friends. In unguarded language that by turns sparkles and dares, these poems invite readers to desire the world as the poet does, to “take notice” (as one poem suggests), and to share lines of poetry as a means of survival… and celebration.
Published by Auntie Press through Troy Book Makers.
Book design by Suyash Chitrakar.
Support Local Booksellers: Lines in the Shed is available for purchase on this site. But you can also find it at these locations: Citiot (Catskill, NY), Wordsmith Bookshoppe (Galesburg, IL), and Prairie Lights (Iowa City, IA).
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR LINES IN THE SHED
”Lines in the Shed refreshes my faith in so many signs of life… the poems decree it as much of a crime to waste good light as to waste a good lay.”
— Nicholas Regiacorte, author of American Massif
“In poems that alternate between whimsy and wisdom, Lines in the Shed… hints at filthy acts that your mouth wants to repeat.”
– Michael Walsh, author of Creep Love and The Dirt Riddles
“Ryan Tracy’s Lines in the Shed… is a charged and changeable map of the poet’s desire lines… leading to places both ordinary and unexpected, but always finding their way back home.”
– Hai-Dang Phan, author of Reenactments and Small Wars
Ryan Tracy’s debut collection of poems explores the pleasures and anxieties of contemporary gay domestic life refracted through an homage to Gertrude Stein. Complimented by original full-color photographs, this emotionally vulnerable yet unapologetic debut shows Tracy creating a finely wrought portrait of what Stein called “the bottom nature” of modern life.
Tender Bottoms
Ryan Tracy’s debut collection of poems, Tender Bottoms, explores the pleasures and anxieties of contemporary gay domestic life—the vicissitudes of romantic attachment, aging, fucking, social accountability, politics, and the reliance on life-sustaining pharmaceuticals—refracted in an homage to Gertrude Stein. Complimented by original full-color photographs, the poems hew to and depart from Stein’s style, finding something new to value in her poetic innovations while also asking for something more, not just from Stein, but from the present moment. In poems that range from the limpid to the ornate, the aphasic to the prosaic, a wry map of pleasure and presentiment emerges, pointing the way toward what Stein called “the bottom nature” of modern life.
Support Local Booksellers: Tender Bottoms is available for purchase on this site. But you can also find it at these locations:: Adam’s Nest (Provincetown, NY), Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza (Albany, NY), Market Block Books (Troy, NY), Citiot (Catskill, NY).
Published by Auntie Press through Troy Book Makers.
Book design by Michael Hofmann.
“whimsical, powerful, sexy”
MORE ADVANCED PRAISE FOR TENDER BOTTOMS
“Tracy responds to Stein with unabashed enthusiasm … and the electric movements of a consciousness coming to a boil”
–Chris Campanioni
“Campy yet earnest, Tracy’s voice is clear and resolved, clever and accessible”
–Angelo Nikolopoulos