Ruben Quesada: A Life Unified Through Verse

While translator, editor, and poet Ruben Quesada knows the honesty that comes through verse, he has never embraced its full scope until now. His latest collection, Brutal Companion, mends his private and public life as a gay, Latino man living with HIV. Both meditative and frenetic, Quesada’s writing catches your breath. This fervent testimony is one you must read, analyze, and read again for beauty and complexity. And though he is at the epicenter of this collection, his poetry speaks to the greater context from which he comes. 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Quesada about this new collection, its themes, and the truths told throughout each line.

How has your poetic voice developed in this latest book compared to what you have published previously?

Brutal Companion was a challenging book to write. So much more of it is unfiltered and vulnerable. You always hear the word “vulnerable,” but it means something here. When I began collecting these poems in 2018, I’d share the poems with a friend who’s an episcopal priest and a poet. He asked me about the inspiration for each poem. I would say, “This inspires it,” or, “It’s about that,” and he would say, “Why aren’t you putting that on the page?” I realized I wanted to keep something for myself but needed to reveal parts I’d never shared, but I pushed through.

How much of this collection draws upon your personal experience, literally or figuratively?

Every poem has something factual; whether it’s a location or a historical moment, it’s an opportunity to pull from the world. My poem “Pyre of a Vanishing Planet” is set on a viaduct in Los Angeles, where I grew up. The poem ends with an apocalyptic moment, and similar moments appear throughout Brutal Companion. I draw on personal experience, but it isn’t necessarily about me. Instead, it is a continuum that leads to who I have become. Looking back at history and imagining how those moments inform us today is essential.

Part of that diagnosis felt like an apocalyptic moment for me.

In another poem, I mention the death of Rock Hudson. I was a child when it happened, and I have no actual memory of it. I only know that he died when I was growing up. As in the poem “Watching Daniel V. Jones,” which is an experience I remember from watching on TV. He was a man diagnosed with HIV, and his insurance would not cover his illnesses. He committed suicide on live television. Even the men I identify as lovers in my poems are an amalgam of people. These are real experiences; they are real people. I carry these memories, and my poems help me work through them. 

In a previous interview on Latinx writers, you said, “It’s troubling to expect a writer to perform their cultural identity, and wearing it on your sleeve shouldn’t be detrimental to the work.” How does this sentiment apply to your multifaceted identities in your work?

I still believe that. There is a collective of Latinx poets called CantoMundo. It is a space where we can nurture the work we are doing. There’s a running joke that we all write poems about our grandmothers and food. These cultural artifacts are the focus of or make their way into our poems. Many late 20th-century Latinx poets, like Gary Soto and Sandra Cisneros, are staples of Latinx literature. They write about food, community, and immigration. I was born and raised in the U.S., and I didn’t have many cultural artifacts from my immigrant family around me. Instead, now, I write about different places I’ve lived and my intimate encounters. I find myself writing about experiences of love, grief, and loss. 

I haven’t found a way to write about my HIV diagnosis directly. It’s something that is still very new for me. It has been less than a decade since my diagnosis. Some of the apocalyptic poems about fire came to me when I was very feverish early in my diagnosis. I was afraid of my body giving up on me. I didn’t know how to live with HIV. I knew nothing. Part of that diagnosis felt like an apocalyptic moment for me. When I write about the world and its destruction, I’m writing about myself.

This collection has been described as meeting the private and the public. You deal with elements of substance abuse, the deaths of gay men, and the loss of parents. Life is horrific, as you’ve said. Is there any celebration of life in this work, and why/why not?

Brutal Companion doesn’t shy away from life’s bleak realities. These poems depict substance abuse, confront the grief of losing loved ones, particularly gay men, and grapple with the ache of parental loss. Yet, amidst this darkness, there is a celebration of life.  My years studying horror aesthetics have solidified my belief in the adage that life imitates art. Horror philosophy suggests that the essence of horror lies in our desire to escape it. Often rooted in the paranormal, horrific situations typically require equally supernatural means of escape, frequently death. Yet, in this landscape of loss and desire, something remarkable emerges–moments of unexpected joy.

These aren’t superficial sentiments but a celebration of life through rich, vivid textures and images. They’re like the razzleberry fringe flowers in my poem “My Mother Is a Garden”—resilient, surprising, and even more beautiful for their unlikely existence. Many of us can relate—to the awareness of mortality, deepening our appreciation for those we hold dear. These poems ask us how mortality shapes our capacity for love and connection. 

Many of your poems reference poets, artists, and other creatives. For example, you reference Paul Monette, who famously wrote that when his partner was diagnosed with AIDS, it was the day they began to live on the moon. How do these people influence your work, and how is that seen in these poems?

Paul Monette had the most significant effect on Brutal Companion, not simply because he wrote about his relationship with his partner, who died of AIDS-related illnesses, but because of his forthright depictions. It’s hard for me to imagine someone in the 1980s writing about AIDS the way he did. It wasn’t until 1985 that Ronald Reagan even uttered the word AIDS. Paul Monette simply put it out there: raw. 

Many other writers write about AIDS. Thom Gunn famously wrote a book called The Man with Night Sweats. It was about him living in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic and observing his community dying. Reading his work felt so confessional. Gil Cuadro is a Latinx poet who published City of God in 1994. The poems focus on his experience as a gay Latino in Los Angeles, but I’d never heard of it; if I had read that earlier, I may have been much more willing to write about my own experiences.

When I first started these poems, I thought it would be a collection about artwork. I received a grant, and I traveled the country visiting museums. It allowed me to compose a lot of ekphrastic work. New research in the Netherlands discovered that viewing art in real life has a much more significant effect on our brains and feelings than a photo. 

The final poem, “The Fortune Teller,” is the name of a painting by Jacques-Louis David, which I saw in San Francisco. It’s a painting of a woman wearing a green scarf reading someone’s palm. In the poem, the fortune teller from the painting comes alive, and I use that to imagine my mother’s death in a lush garden setting. The fortune teller says a haze of zinnias hushed in the rain when my mother died. When the rain hits the leaves, it makes a distinct whooshing sound. In many ways, the earth is experiencing sorrow. I imagine it’s what my mother would hear when she goes—the sound of the natural world.

Many of the poems in this collection have an interplay of darkness and light—fires catching moonlight on a lover. What are these limitations of light and darkness for you?

There are many ways to think about darkness and light in my poems and my life. As a child, my family moved to more than ten different neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. I first came to observe the world around me, and it was dark and unstable. I kept a journal to hold onto my thoughts and emotions. For years, this was a home. 

I’ve learned to turn the page on welcome darkness in recent years. I found myself unwittingly in a relationship with someone like myself. It’s hard to find beauty in the darkest places. In the darkness were feelings of envy for jobs, publications, and success. 

Once, at the AWP writer’s conference, I spent the day greeting people while stationed at the book fair. A writer approached me and said, “I can see your light across the hall.” It was a joyous moment. She was acknowledging something that I always knew was inside me. Surrounding myself with joy required a change in my environment. Being present is challenging, but there is joy in the moment.

One of the most striking aspects of Brutal Companion is how it transforms the act of writing into a form of resistance against despair. My poem “On Witness” exemplifies this and encourages readers to embrace life’s fragility, empowering us to do the same. My poem suggests that appreciating beauty requires acknowledging pain and implies hope can be found by facing life’s realities head-on. 

I invite readers to engage with both the light and shadow of the human experience, fostering a more nuanced and resilient approach to life’s complexities. The imagery of nature, light, and mythic themes explore hope and transcendence, like in the poems “Afterlife” and “Angels of Paradise.” These pieces tap into the desire to find meaning beyond our immediate circumstances. In our darkest moments, where do we turn for solace or inspiration?

This is not your first work or collection to explore elements of faith. However, in the context of your HIV status, I can’t help but think of Angels in America by Tony Kushner. In your opinion, what is the connection between queer life and the angelic, the destructive, the classical?

Exploring elements of faith in Brutal Companion naturally leads me to consider the intersections of queerness, spirituality, and mythology. When you mention Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, I see a resonance in how Kushner’s work and my poetry engage with these themes through the lens of queerness.

In many ways, queerness has always been about transformation and transcendence, both of identity and experience. In religious and mythological contexts, angels often serve as messengers, intermediaries between the mortal and the divine, and as symbols of transformation or revelation. For those of us who identify as queer, there’s often a feeling of being on the margins, navigating the space between societal norms and our authentic selves, much like angels exist between heaven and earth.

In Angels in America, Kushner uses the angelic to represent both salvation and the burden of prophecy—a calling to see the world as it truly is and to demand more of it. The angelic resonates with my work as I explore how queer existence demands honesty in facing both beauty and horror, life, and death. The angelic can symbolize the struggle to find a place of belonging in a world that often doesn’t accept us and the potential to rise above that rejection with grace and power. It’s a reminder of the importance of embracing beauty and horror, as they are integral parts of the human experience and can lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

The destructive element ties closely to the idea of transformation. For queer people, there’s a destruction of the old self, the self that conforms to societal expectations, and the birth of a new, authentic identity. In my poetry, I often confront the brutal realities of this transformation—whether it’s through the loss of loved ones, the pain of substance abuse, or the raw experiences of facing mortality. This process of destruction and rebirth echoes the mythological narratives where chaos often precedes creation.

Classical references in my work, like those to Aristophanes, Hermes, or Icarus, connect queerness to the grand tradition of myth and legend, framing it within the timeless stories of love, loss, and transcendence. The classical world was not free from queer identities; instead, it included them in its pantheon of gods, heroes, and mythical figures. By invoking these figures, I’m grounding the queer experience in a historical and cultural continuum that affirms its place in the human story. This connection to the classical also speaks to the idea of elevating queer life to something timeless, something that is both human and divine, tragic and beautiful.

Ultimately, the connection between queer life and the angelic, the destructive, and the classical is about the paradox of existence itself. It’s about embracing all aspects of being—our suffering, joys, and transformations—while seeking a kind of grace that transcends them. In my work, I aim to find the sacred in the struggles and the divine in the ordinary moments, much like Kushner does in his exploration of what it means to live and love in a world that is often hostile to difference.

Christ 

nevermore 

than a man 

nailed 

to a cross 

but 

from him 

I learned 

a life 

can fit 

into a palm 

like a book 

of poems 

Ruben Quesada, “The Fortune Teller”

You said Jesus Christ’s life fit into a book of verses. How does your life fit into this book and these verses? 

Brutal Companion captures painful moments threaded through my life. I don’t want to call it a book of pain; it’s a journey. It is a record of loss in many ways, whether it has happened or is yet to come. I observe the beauty around me and try to depict it as clearly as possible. This book helped me look back at moments in my life that were grievous and joyous. Brutal Companion captures a fraction of my life in my hands; these poems confirm my resilience.

If you are interested in purchasing Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion, click here. Quesada’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review and TriQuarterly. He is the translator of Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. 

Feature photo courtesy of Volkan Photography and Ruben Quesada