“What kind of person,” he thinks, “what kind of poetic organizing intelligence, upon seeing menstrual blood on a bedsheet after not-great sex, thought of Medusa’s decapitation?” When he voices the thought, the room dissolves into an exchange of barbed words: “cooter,” “asshole,” “triggered,” “sexist.” Naive enough to believe in poetry’s transformative force, but cynical enough in their darker moments to consider poetry a pseudo-spiritual calling, something akin to the affliction of televangelists.” The work on the table is a 15-page single-spaced poem called “Andromeda and Perseus” by a young woman called Beth, and after listening to his cohort’s increasingly effusive praise-culminating in one young woman calling the comparison of blood on a sheet to a Gorgon head “stunning” and “irrefutable”-Seamus, a white man from a working-class background, begins to giggle. “In seminar,” the novel begins, “grad students on plastic folding chairs: seven women, two men. “I started writing this character, Seamus, who says a lot of things that people think and feel privately.” I was just like, Oh, this is such a scam.” He was in his final semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“It all felt very facile and cheap and tawdry. “I was sitting in a seminar one day feeling really cranky and frustrated about the way that people in America were talking about art and identity,” he told Vanity Fair. Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, bloomed from a moment of intense frustration.
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