My Life as Adam by Bryan Borland

My Life as Adam Reviews

• 
  BookChampions

  Bryan Borland's debut collection of poems from 2010 is a generous one. Not only did the poems illuminate so many things I have felt and thought, but the structures are energetic and accessible. I have several minilessons in my head inspired by the poems in this collection.
  
  My Life as Adam resonated with me much in the same way Chen Chen's debut did earlier this year: poems about family and regret, poems about love. Both make me feel things I sometimes don't want to think about or feel, but after each poem there was a bit of an emotional exhale for me as reader. In that way, Borland's collection is a little bit like therapy.
  
  It also happens to be full of energizing diction and syntax. I feel like I can imagine how Borland would read these poems; the voice was so strong.
  
  There are too many poems I love to mention here, but "Manifesto(es)" One and Two are gems still reverberating in me today. I'm grateful for this book—and eager to read my next Borland.
• 
  Grady

  BRYAN BORLAND
  MY LIFE AS ADAM
  
  ‘You have to have been there…’ No, this insensitive statement regarding whether or not the reader can or would understand the depth of feeling of a journeyman is shattered in Bryan Borland’s intensely honest and painfully lovely book of poems, MY LIFE AS ADAM. Bryan Borland is a gay poet, writing from experiences and developmental thought patterns that have defied the at times Sisyphusian steps to becoming a sexually liberated male. He enters his world as a nascent, ambiguous ADAM and returns at the end a fully developed MAN. He begins:
  
  My life as Adam
  
  In the beginning, I was the first on Earth
  to feel this way, born
  
  from the dust of the ground, the salt
  of my father, hungry for graven images of myself,
  
  awakening from shameful dreams
  ripping bone from my new body,
  
  a boy carrying mankind’s progeny
  in sweaty psalms.
  
  In the beginning, I tilled the garden, planting
  seeds of normalcy that never grew,
  
  Ever-present voices inventing sin,
  threats of banishment in booths meant for confession:
  
  It is no good for man
  to be alone
  
  When he discovers his soul
  is between his legs.
  
  While other authors have occultly coped with homosexuality – writers such as Thomas Mann, Henry James, EM Forster, and Herman Melville – Borland emerges, not from a retrospective speculation or latter day unveiling of truths that were always there, quietly shrouded in correctness, but from an immediate stance, his home in Little Rock, Arkansas, a place where the dimensions of religion, family, and sexuality are more rigidly drawn, perhaps, than on the coastal bifurcations of a country still at war with individual rights and freedoms. He shares his struggles with the early duplicity of dating girls:
  
  Grapes are the perfect food
  
  was what we said to each other at
  tense moments, which might have been
  
  often, which might have been
  the whole relationship, how many years
  
  I’ve forgotten but I do remember
  holding hands in public, or how
  
  we’d order an appetizer at a restaurant
  and she’d serve me before herself.
  
  If it weren’t for the sex
  we might have made a go of it, lasted
  
  beyond those early college classes
  where I learned Christianity
  
  was not the only religion, where
  a boy named Jonathan turned me on
  
  to matzah brei and kugel
  and I couldn’t get enough.
  
  Borland deals gently, if with some pain, with the process heretofore known as ‘coming out’ – a phrase science and intellect have quashed with the examination of DNA positions on our genetic helices that mark our characteristics as we move from infancy toward adulthood. He writes of awakening feelings and early experiences, at times believed to be one-sided on the surface, a lost moment forgotten, but in retrospect lightening the dark room of being alone, incapable of feeling or defining or expressing love.
  
  Shoulder
  
  On the thirty-minute drive
  between his bedroom and mine,
  cloaked in the redeeming glow
  of dashboard lights,
  he spoke of his crush on
  a classmate named Ben
  and of how homosexuality
  exists even in canines.
  
  My straight friend,
  clumsy and thoughtful,
  embracing me
  before I could embrace myself.
  
  And while other poets may flail at the ‘ties that bind’, Borland instead explores them with the gentlest sense of understanding and belonging that family and religion have defined as normalcy. He paints the atmosphere in which he grew, the cloudy homophobia making dark his possibility of self-recognition and esteem.
  
  Queer Progression
  
  Two twenty-something men on MTV,
  a kiss behind apartment building bricks.
  Queer was a New York City thing. I don’t know
  how many sidekicks slipped by unnoticed,
  
  don’t know when I began to pay attention to
  bottom corners in the back of dirty magazines,
  to junior high teases that hurt like gospel.
  Manhattan skies were grey on television,
  
  crowded, cold, boy-heat breathing.
  In Arkansas our winters were mild.
  The Bible and TIME on our coffee table,
  Ellen DeGeneres, Yup, I’m Gay.
  
  I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
  
  We were always changing channels in my house.
  
  Lust – more easily explored, recalled, fantasized – too often, he opines, replaced love/embrace/touch/need.
  
  Watching Brokeback Mountain in Little Rock
  
  …..In Arkansas we see two men kiss
  and turn away. There’s no
  affection on rural streets,
  just pickup trucks and
  rednecks on our breath.
  In the temple of theater,
  we are studied, two men
  sitting too close, legs touching the way
  our hands cannot.
  We watch and recognize,
  tune out the action movie stigmata
  bleeding though the walls.
  
  Bryan Borland is one of the few poets who is able to so deftly define the thin line between straight and gay, especially addressing the totems and rituals that are designed to introduce the afterwards.
  
  There was a moment of tenderness
  …..After his surgery,
  I skipped school to drive him home.
  In the cold, broad daylight
  the warmth of his hand startled me.
  It was the medication talking
  or maybe I misheard
  when he slurred words
  that made us equals.
  It was weakness
  when he offered me his wounded smile,
  how I sped from validation,
  and returned us to a familiar territory,
  stories of sex with his girlfriend
  while she was on the rag.
  
  But he is equally able to present the joy of finding a life partner/husband as in
  
  Shopaholic
  
  We sleep in a tight squeeze
  until we can afford
  a larger bed.
  
  Husband, dear,
  why do you think I spend our pay
  on exotic herbs
  and good chocolate?
  
  If every dime we save
  is an inch you’re apart from me in the night
  our grocery lists will remain long,
  our cupboard well stocked.
  
  and turn as compassionately to memories of victims of AIDS or early deaths or other tragedies as in
  
  Angels of Chernobyl
  
  They pay money to see a gaping wound
  in the city, Ground Zero, New York,
  
  where camera flashes confuse visitors,
  whether to smile in the photographs
  
  they ask strangers to take. Most do.
  In the Lower Ninth, tour buses
  
  idle at shotgun houses with death
  painted on abandoned front doors.
  
  I dated a boy once whose left arm
  had been mangled in a car accident.
  
  In bed he shyly asked me to kiss
  his scars and shook in climax
  
  at my breath against his skin.
  He doesn’t resurface often,
  
  but from time to time I receive postcards,
  the last from Ukraine, a picture
  
  of a nuclear winter snow angel
  I pressed gently to my lips.
  
  When he sings of found loves he celebrates his hard won treasure, and when he has lost that love, as in ‘Holden’, ‘The Book of David’, or ‘The Book of Joshua, Epilogue’, he has learned more about commitment and perception than most will acknowledge. Borland’s verse is free, shaped meaningfully on the page as though he were opening windows for fellow travelers to gain hold on a future that can be positive.
  Bryan Borland’s first book of his poems, MY LIFE AS ADAM, is his life and he owns it, a life of sensing, noticing, yearning for the bite of the forbidden apple where the fruit has been distorted by religions and codices of human behavior in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent him from acceptance of what he intuited would be beautiful. It is this journey to date he sensitively shares – like that little beggar along the path who smiles at our sheckles and says thank you in a way that changes us – permanently.
  
  He who loves his brother abides in the light
  and in him there is no cause of stumbling.
  The Bible, Book of John
• 
  Guy

  My Life as Adam, starts right in the beginning, when hormones meets social norms and the expending mind of youth. It follows with poems about love, fear, loss and joy, the struggle of a social deviant to cast a light on the absurdity of judgement and the struggle for self understanding. The story of a modern-day oppression in the Land of Freedom. Don’t get me wrong, Bryan Borland, the author, is almost never on the down side of things, rather in a place to show a pity for those who fight fear of life. Bryan gives as a mirror, an eyepiece to places we are afraid or ashamed to watch in light. The book ends with a clear message of understanding in the name of the religion of love while the author stands confidently comfort with himself.
  
  The book is intense and challenging as Bryan opens up ever door of his life and invites us to sit down and be taken by the imagery. it is a social call seasoned with humor and self humor, filled with sad moments and tears. The book is divers in it subjects but never leaving the main line, therefore we, the reader, can relive the story.
  
  My Life as Adam, as its title suggest, is an autobiography. Its wonderful poetic verse washes you as you read, leaving you wet shaking. But Adam isn’t just a man, it is the archetype for Men. Though it tells the story of a gay man in the progressive world but Bryan manage elegantly to find the parallels and similarities to anyone’s life story. From this point, of the social weak, one can fight and one can jump. Bryan chooses to find the thread that connects as all.
  
  My Life as Adam is the story of every man and women, it is a peep hole into our own souls.
• 
  Steven

  This collection was the first time I read Borland's work and I was hooked. Every page is filled with his insight and craftsmanship.
• 
  Hugh

  I have become an eager fan of Bryan Borland's striking yet lithe writing. He presents photo-realistic sketches of life growing up, growing up gay, and how significant events in his life crafted him into who he is today. With an enviable self-awareness he talks about his own shortcomings and strengths as well as those of others, meshing encounters into a montage of insights and consequences. His awareness also shines a light onto events of the times he lived in and the politics that surrounded him.
  
  Reading the collection "My Life as Adam" has incited a reasonably-sized typhoon of emotions in me. Simply said, his poems punched me in the soul repeatedly. Interpret that as a compliment.
• 
  Matthew

  Borland has certainly grown as a writer. His most recent collection is heartbreaking, but here he is clearly a new poet. The language stumbles even when strong and smart. I loved and related to a lot of these poems despite their flaws.