• DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen
  • DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen
  • DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen
  • DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen

DON'T LEAVE ME THIS WAY by Eric Sneathen

205 x 125mm, 80 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2023

A textual and historiographical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet’s “promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,” this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature’s bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle. -Brian Teare

Published by 

Nightboat Books

Regular price £12.99