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by Jendi Reiter (Author)
Poetry. This fourth collection from transmasculine poet Jendi Reiter brilliantly blends the sly, the sincere, and the sting of hard realities held close. Whether talking back to God, Tony Soprano, or their adolescent child, the speakers of these poems work through pain to find wisdom, humor, and grace. Says Denise Duhamel, "Reiter's Introvert Pervert is politically personal and personally political, bursting with post-confessional wit and tenderness. The poems 'confess' in therapists' offices, both 'real' and imagined (e.g. Dr. Jennifer Melfi from The Sopranos). A woman becomes a man, a child becomes a parent with a delightfully neo-surrealist intolerance for intolerance, school shootings, banned books, and the tortured children of Palestine."
Duhamel muses, "Is to love all creatures perverse? Then I'm a pervert too! Jendi Reiter ventures behind the hideously perverse headlines and turns to poetry where the real truth lives. They write poems about all the ways our complicated lives have been further complicated by hate. And this introvert pervert/poet isn't going to take it, isn't going down without a cuddle."
Remi Recchia adds, "Few poets can alchemize potty humor, incest survivorship, and pop culture and render the creation into YHWH-facing art. But Jendi Reiter can. In Introvert Pervert, be it through cruising erasures or an homage to Tony Soprano, the speaker dips his toe into a lake that was once frozen, a 'river of jawbones' or 'the flood with the carnivores' and their 'reptilian sludge.' The undertow-a strained but evolving marriage, 'people' who 'love sunrises and want me dead, ' the memory of a mother unmothering-is mighty, but the poet's tide is stronger. What the speaker calls a 'blunt instinct to worship, ' the reader might, and should, call an honor to witness."
