As tender as it is fierce, Christopher Soden’s Closer takes you through an emotional landscape, rich with vivid imagery and poignant observations. It is by turns somber and sanguine, erotic and erudite, sometimes touched by giddy loopiness. Drawing on predecessors from ancient Greece to his Beatnik forebears, Soden’s confessional narratives tap directly into an intense worldview, an honest, existential look at same-gender sexuality, queer virility, maleness, and, ultimately, the human condition.
The writing is vivid, powerful. The poignant observations…seemed like a leaf from my own life, only couched with such beautiful prose that I often felt mesmerized, reading many of them over and over just to wallow in Soden’s beautiful wordplay. —Alan Chin – Gay/Lesbian Fiction Book Reviews
Christopher Soden’s Closer is somewhat more traditional free-verse but no less striking for its versatility as well as its veracity. Soden’s work is wide-ranging, covering a variety of subjects both universal and personal. However, he doesn’t ignore queer issues or erotica…it’s a wonderful read. —Jerry Wheeler – Out in Print
The emotionally rich landscape in Christopher Soden’s Closer veers from the contemporary to the ancient Greeks, covering the existential to the queer condition, in a delightfully poignant manner…Soden’s poetry is amazingly moving. —Diane Anderson-Minshall – Advocate Bookshelf
Soden’s strength is twofold: first, in his lush evocation of the world, the happenings, and the encounters that call the self into being, and second, in the incandescent honesty of that emerging self.” —Lisa Huffaker —Chelsea Station
Its softness is matched by the heft of its content and is a tremendous example of modern gay poetics in its simplest form, anchored by the talent in Soden’s rhythmic weaving of emotion, place and time.” —Emerson Whitney —Lambda Literary
Closer, Christopher Soden’s first full length poetry collection, published by Queermojo/Rebel Sartori Press, is a rich and provocative collection that circles and re-circles human experience, honing in on sex, love, self, loss, memory, regret, and place. Soden’s voice is expansive–in turn pensive, tender, vehement, ecstatic, reverent, irreverent, intimate, ironic, conversational, oratorial–and his poems teem with hard-won existential perspective. —Julia Crane – Coal Hill Review
