Beloved Antimatter: Poems by Ned Parfan

There are, everywhere in Beloved Antimatter, specters: of literary forebears; of half-attentive romantic partners; of unavailable, unrealizable offspring. Ned Parfan’s response to absence and imperfectible presence is untrammeled imagination, resourceful and relentless cleverness; his poems at multiple turns funny because freighted with grief, actual and anticipatory, and longing. Across four sequences, Parfan’s book reads like the kind of project a poet can only accomplish when they are already at the midpoint of their career, just as they also edge closer to the middle of their life: The poems are world-weary—casting their gaze on the future, present, and past, each a bewildering, phantasmagoric era—but also occasionally risqué, marked by instances where gravitas shares space with jouissance, evidence of the self still persisting in their desire to be more of themself. And throughout the book is an undeniable confidence, a calibrated knowledge of when to flaunt an almost melismatic excess of sound work and vocabulary that invokes resplendent legacies of queer (or queer-adjacent) Anglophone poets and pop divas—or of when to wield unadorned candor, hard-earned from years of experience. As regards amorous frustration, the persona quips, “I’m a schoolboy with a crush / and I am too old for this shit.” In the book’s title sequence, the speaker diagnoses their life, turns to their child—their “postapocalyptic tub / of rocky road ice cream,” their product of impossible fulfillment, their “afterword”—and laments: “The point is why avoid mistakes / when you are not here / to forgive me?” In its rangy, full-throated performance of a spectrum of queer-inflected identities as progeny, as paramour, as parent, as poet, Beloved Antimatter becomes penetrable and bedazzles, as ode and elegy.
—Mark Anthony

The attention to the malleable shapes of the lyric sequence—which began in his first two books—persists prominently in Ned Parfan’s third volume of poetry. Consisting entirely of four chapbook-length sequences, Beloved Antimatter features a procedural homage to two poets, an apostrophe on biological frustrations around the desire to have a child, a disembodied lover’s voice hurtling between the present and the fictional realm of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, and a lyric narrative on nonexclusive polyamory. Parfan’s latest work offers longtime and new readers a variety of coherences, fragmentations, personae, formal compulsions, and thematic obsessions.