Boston Gordon (he/they) is a gay transgender poet, communications professional, and designer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He is the author of the chapbook Glory Holes, which is out now from Harbor Editions. His first full-length book, Loose Bricks, will be published in May of 2025. He runs the You Can't Kill A Poet reading series—which highlights queer and trans identified writers in Philadelphia. He has poems published in many places like Guernica, American Poetry Review, and Best New Poets.
He runs all communications for Philadelphia Legal Assistance and for the You Can’t Kill a Poet reading series. He also offers freelance social media communications support and management for organizations looking to launch or rejuvenate their online presence.
Praise for Loose Bricks:
If Bacchus could text the nights of excess into a chart of enlightened revelry, that time machine would be a poet named Boston Gordon, who declares, "I am the hidden parts in a machine." Here is poetry eavesdropping on yourself, your past, your shiny future of the life you get to live. This book is queer gusto in a world that barely deserves what we have to offer. Gordon is great!
—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
If texting is a supreme form of secret messaging, how doubly lucky we are to be privy to the new poems/texts of Boston Gordon. We enter this world with “so many songs at Frank’s tonight/ruined my life”, reminding us that ruination and ecstasy are bosom buddies, two sides of the same queer coin. Loose Bricks is a bliss for all of us “to hear a freight train as I lay in bed at night./ in that old miserable apartment/where I don’t miss you.” Despite ourselves, on different days, “Loving is like/being alone.”
If poetry is, at its hot heart, about unanswerable questions, the subject/object must loom large among those queries. Who do we write to, who do we text, what is secrecy, what ruins our lives, and what merely offers us redemption? Texting as poetic form merges the art of the epistle with the art of the footnote with the art of the sharply-indrawn breath; through texting-as-poem, a poet can admonish themself — “write about darts”—, can try and try again “it began with a whistle” “A note to J for when they are sober”, can fantasize about spitting in someone’s mouth, can revel in the “deliciousness of new love”. This new book is all of these things, and as a reader, I am complicit and honored to be so. Loose Bricks is a revelation.
—July Westhale, author of Via Negativa and moon moon
Praise for Glory Holes:
Here are Boston Gordon’s poems: glory holes, each of them, with a waiting want on the other side. Where anything worth praying to is also worth desiring in lush quantity: “When you kissed / you remembered the prayers, and also / the dream.” Where we, the reader and the omnipresent, get smoked and listened to: “look, it’s the bad alleyway with the bathhouse. / Steam and men slink through the door cracks, hot.” Where “the other is howling, maybe.”
What joy and ache live in these lines and the spaces surrounding them. What a call to a world, a howling other, which lives in the dark and cracked recesses of ourselves—which is to say, all those who need it, need only read these words, close their eyes, say “comeback. Take up my space. Everyone is leaving.”
–July Westhale, author of Trailer Trash, Via Negativa, and bright news like gladiolas
Boston Gordon’s poems whistle a queer urgency that aches with desire. Here is a speaker who interrogates masculinity while simultaneously flaunting it, fearing it, and finding themself aroused by it. Tender, vulnerable, and gritty, these poems sing unapologetically of spitting and blow jobs and sex work and the strangeness of having a body.
–Lisa Summe, author of Say It Hurts
You Can’t Kill a Poet
About
Founded in 2014, You Can’t Kill a Poet is a regular reading series highlighting queer and/or trans-identified writers and poets. Regularly hosted at Tattooed Mom, but traveling around the city, the series seeks to be an enthusiastic and exuberant outlet for LGBTQ poets wanting to find a space for themselves.
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“I am a social media communications manager and freelance consultant with a passion for creatively telling the story of an organization.”