In an interview earlier this year, Lonely Christopher described his debut poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (see above trailer):
It’s a collection of poetry that I wrote while my mother was battling late stage cancer and after she died. It was a very necessary thing for me to write—the only way I knew how to react to what was happening, which seemed so much larger than anything I had heretofore directly experienced. It’s an angry book screaming out for redemption.
Felix Bernstein appreciates how Christopher “depicts a prickly, dangerous, upsetting world that somehow reveals the unthinkably awful without making it palatable”:
Series is a prolonged elegy to Christopher’s mother, who died in August 2011, and was written from the time of his mother’s decline (“Poems in June” chronicling June 2011) to only about a year after her death. This “Death and Disaster Series” does the opposite of the “death and disaster” artworks provided us by Warhol and [Kenneth] Goldsmith: this is not a work that appropriates the banal in order to render it sublime. Rather, this is a work that draws from personal experience in order to make precarious beauties that lack any sort of monumentality in the face of darkness. In that way, his work can be seen to follow the neglected tracks of [John] Wieners, who called what he wrote obsessional, not confessional, poetry.
If Wieners obsessively tried to write the most embarrassing thing he could think of, Christopher betters him with even more guttural honesty:
“My boyfriend fucked me tonight without a condom / or lubricant; my anal wall started bleeding and / he cut open his dick before he came / and I shit blood.” But even within the goriest of passages, there is often a delicate treasuring of the poet’s personal glimpses of beauty.
In another recent rave review, Joyelle McSweeney also picked up on the contradictions in Christopher’s verse:
The lushness of Lonely Christopher is a contradictory flora, both decorated and plain, but always intensely voiced, dramatic, forceful, and red-hued. This is a poet who can write “I love a boy’s cock/it make me think of AIDS/it gets me off.” and who can end a volume by writing, simply, of his dead mother, “I love you, Susan”, while in the same volume producing ruffles and flourishes and lacings (and lashings) of language, of decadent aesthetic pleasure. My favorite poems in the volume are the ones which do both, deploying an admirable directness and a delectable oddness….
The Dish 