Diagnosed with a terminal cancer, poet and community activist Jeffrey Betcher spent the last months of his life crafting an extraordinary crown of sonnets. Although Jeffrey had never written in meter before, at mentor Annie Finch’s suggestion he began a crown in anapestic rhythm that he crafted into the gorgeous, unstinting testament of a courageous soul navigating cancer and facing death. This memorial chapbook is the first publication of the sonnets. Adept and searching, shot through with honesty, wit, and courage, singing with powerful rhythms and unforgettable words, this little book offers poetry at its best.
’Whistling Through’ is a major poem, an important contribution to anapestic poetry in English, to gay literature, to the form of the crown of sonnets, and to the literature of mortality.
-Annie Finch
Betcher’s crown of sonnets is an alchemical transmutation where his ordeal becomes a no-holds-barred odyssey that’s profound, funny, terrifying, and utterly dazzling.
-Lex Nover
The poetry of Jeffrey Betcher speaks from the entire collective of American queer stray culture, that very lost-and-found narrative of reinvention on the docks of survival. Though he dodged the HIV bullet in the plague-torn years, a terminal bout of cancer cut his life short in 2017. Jeffrey Betcher’s epic sonnet Whistling Through is an odyssey into the cancer machine and death itself.
-Toussaint St. Negritude
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