Description: Odeum
Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach is a complex and piercing debut collection. In these poems, we see both history and present with unflinching clarity. Uncovering and documenting Pittsburgh’s local queer history, Switzer also opens our consciousness to the vast everywhere of queer erasure. Switzer calls us in to queer recovery, to queer history, and to a queer lyricism that feels like a beautiful, stubborn streetlight flickering in its insistence, its fracture, its undeniable grace. - Stacey Waite , author
In Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach Switzer captures Pittsburgh’s erased lives, loves, and landscapes with the ingenuity and integrity of poet— a poet who is also a street scholar, a digital archivist, a lyrical photojournalist, and psychic detective. Switzer exposes the ways social injustice metastasizes into environmental injustice. The names and images recovered here make the forgotten present. Every act of recovery in this compact, terrific collection is a call to action. - Terrance Hayes
Haunted by evanescence and absence, Silas Switzer unearths artifacts of the AIDS epidemic in this devastating debut collection. Resurrecting touchstones of queer culture in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Switzer is deft and restrained. His spare, striking language reconstructs history hidden under bridges and behind storefronts, while the intimacy of his poems damn the cold jargon of bureaucracy. This is not a book of remembering. This is a reliquary warning against the complacency of forgetting. - Michele Bat