Comprising a decade of writing, James Loop’s debut collection chronicles an ordinary life in patriarchal time, its subjugation and inventive resistance. 

In conversation with classical and modern models—particularly the Latin lyric and twentieth-century queer literatures—Metronome sounds an arcade of voices whose multiplicity, deviance, and good (and bad) humor subtly subvert authority’s myths. These intricately patterned and slyly reflexive poems employ inherited forms, including pastiche, dirge, lyric, epigram, diatribe, diary, epistolary, and prayer, submitting their variations and intercessions on what’s been and what is.

James Loop’s Metronome is alive to wit, the comedy of having a body, and the erotic life of language itself. The poems move with a rare tonal agility—by turns tender, caustic, devotional, and laugh-out-loud funny—where grief and pleasure are co-conspirators. Loop’s style is both literary and unbuttoned. What feels most bracing and most queer here is the way thought itself becomes erotic, how attention, memory, and intellect gleam as forms of intimacy. This is a book that insists thinking can be a mode of loving, and that lyric seriousness can still be mischievous, worldly, and alive. 
—Stacy Szymaszek