WE PREFER THE DAMNED

A set of enigmatic poems that limn the inner workings of relationships.

Matos, a bisexual-plus author who’s an English professor at the City Colleges of Chicago and a former mixed martial arts fighter, explores a number of personal and confessional themes in these autobiographical works. He hymns his working-class Portuguese American family, despite their difficulty in comprehending his sexuality, and revisits pop-cultural touchstones from his childhood in the 1980s and ’90s—Prince and Madonna songs, Tony Danza’s fetching presence in Who’s the Boss—and their roles in tutoring his desires. Most of all, he dissects convoluted feelings and ironies of love affairs with men, women, and, sometimes, both at once. Matos’ verse often sounds like an address to a lover, full of private intimacies that the reader can’t fully understand. The resolute interiority of this poetry of conflicted yearnings can make it challenging to decipher. At times, the author’s imagery has an abstract tenor that’s arid and uninvolving: “Recall that you are largely rhetorical [anyway] / having evolved to where being used and being useful has little distinction.” At other times, his metaphors are hallucinatory and full of impact, though still puzzling: “She breaks without speaking takes from a muttering of shoulders / a measure of the wreck of us.” Still, these poems are packed with moments of imagistic and emotional power. A few of them, for example, gleefully rub the reader’s nose in a gross earthiness (“like a wet sticky foal / sticky as the bottom of your son’s shoe that never misses / the fresh pile of dog turds near the elementary school”) or offer a tender lyricism with a fairy-tale ring: “He married a woman once / who knew something about singing / and thought his days would be filled with song.”

Cryptic, sometimes-baffling works whose intense, colorful language captures the imagination.