Winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry, Texas Institute of Letters
From the rural South Texas of the nineteen fifties to a desert mesa in New Mexico many years later, Anyone’s Son illuminates the moments of a life animated by the author’s yearning, at its root sexual, for the company of another man. In five sections, each one corresponding to a stage in the life delineated here, the author offers scenes from his childhood on a small farm, as well as moments of conflicted adolescence. He explores unmitigated sexual pleasure, sometimes fraught with anguish and shame. He remembers scenes from marriage and fatherhood, from the wreckage and rebuilding that came at midlife. And finally, glimpses from a second marriage, this time unconflicted, to a man, to the right man. At its heart, Anyone’s Son poses an implicit question: What is identity?
Anyone’s Son is painfully beautiful, a tremendous book of both profound longing and tenderness.
David Meischen has achieved something remarkable with Anyone’s Son, a collection of poems that unfolds as a chronicle of a certain American experience rarely explored in such depth or with such grace of language.
~ Bryan Borland, author of DIG
Anyone’s Son is a book of music and memory. In this remarkable first collection David Meischen brings us with him across decades and landscapes, through bedrooms and parked cars, across a life riven through with longing.
~ Sam Sax, author of bury it and madness
To read these poems is to reach in and touch the visceral scars of one who spent years impaled on the barbed wire of forbidden desire, years of denial when other men’s sons were flesh only to be dreamed.
~ Madelyn Garner, Hum of Our Blood
This beautiful collection radiates in circling patterns—adolescence, desire, domesticity, rural Texas dust—and is imbued with a powerful, central message: “There have to be scars/or there is no trail to follow.”
~ Valerie Martínez, author of Absence, Luminescent and Each and Her
“I am not here to make you comfortable,” David Meischen writes twice in his brilliant, moving, candid and ultimately formal first book. Filled with sonorous, woven lines, each poem renews its form—often a pantoum—and unspools for us the story of a gay man discovering the world.
~ Hilda Raz, author of List and Story
David Meischen’s poems trace his life, from childhood on the family farm, through adolescence and manhood, with fidelity, sensitivity, and subtle power. The poems are finely detailed and emotionally perceptive, the work of a man who is fully alive and vitally responsive to life and the lives around him.
~ David Wevill, author of To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill
