The Late Americans


 
 
 
 
 Also by Brandon Taylor
 
 Real Life
 Filthy Animals
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Riverhead Books
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Brandon Taylor
 Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
 Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines from the poem “A Top Won’t Save You But Neither Will Prayer” by Derrick Austin. First published in MumberMag (December 28, 2020).
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Taylor, Brandon (Brandon L. G.), author.
 Title: The late Americans / Brandon Taylor.
 Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2023.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022021915 (print) | LCCN 2022021916 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593332337 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593332351 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
 Classification: LCC PS3620.A93534 L38 2023 (print) | LCC PS3620.A93534 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021915
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021916
 International edition ISBN: 9780593713037
 Cover design: Stephanie Ross
 Cover art: Logan T. Sibrel, Chin Smooch, 2020 / Courtesy of the artist and 1969 Gallery
 Book design by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 pid_prh_6.0_143550374_c0_r0
 
 
 
 
 
 You know how you’d receive a god. What if it was
 a portion of his flesh? What if you were terribly hungry?
 Derrick Austin
 
 
 
 
 
 1.
 The Late Americans
 In seminar, grad students on plastic folding chairs: seven women, two men. 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.
 Outside, the last blue day in October. Snow in the forecast.
 They discuss “Andromeda and Perseus,” a poem submitted by Beth, who has reversed the title of the Titian painting in order to center Andromeda’s suffering rather than the heroics of Perseus—rapist, killer, destroyer of women.
 “The taking is as brutal as the captivity,” says this squat girl from Montana.
 The poem spans fifteen single-spaced pages, and contains, among other things, a graphic description of period sex in which menstrual blood congeals on a gray comforter. This is designated “the Gorgon’s mark,” in relation to “the iron stain” left on Medusa’s robes following her decapitation by Perseus.
 Around they go, taking in the poem’s allusive system of images and its narrative density, the emotional heat of its subject matter, its increasing cultural salience re: women, re: trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end of the world.
 “I love the gestural improvisation of it all—so very Joan Mitchell,” says Helen, who had once been some kind of Mormon child bride out in a suburb of Denver, and who now lives above a bar in downtown Iowa City, writing poems about dying children and pubic lice.
 “I mean, like, so sharp, diamond sharp. Could cut a bitch, you know? God.” Noli, nineteen, child prodigy. Disappointing her parents. Poetry instead of, what, medical school, curing cancer?
 “Totally. So raw, though. So visceral.”
 “And heightened—” Mika, twenty-eight, Stevie Nicks impersonator in her bangles and boots and gauzy drapery.
 “—charged-up, high-voltage shit—” Noli again, so talkative today. So chatty.
 “Voice, voice, voice.” Here, Linda, black from Tulsa. Braids. Glossy, perfect skin. She went to UT Austin, did a PhD in physics at MIT. Finished. Or dropped out. Either way, here in Iowa with the rest of them. In some kind of tension with Noli, also black, also brilliant. Not sisters. High-intensity mutual exclusion.
 “Finally, something real,” Noli says. Linda’s gaze sharpens. “But totally rigorous. Like, not fake slam-poet shit. Just voice.”
 “I want this in my veins. Hard,” Helen says.
 The effluvia of praise washes over Beth, who receives their compliments with a placid glow. The instructor, never quite in contention for the Pulitzer but never quite out of it either, nods slowly as he presides over them like a fucking youth minister.
 Or so Seamus imagined as he drowsed in half focus. Then, coming back to himself, to the room, becoming present, he really looked. Beth’s lips were in a thin line, her eyebrows in deep grooves. Miserable despite the praise, when praise seemed so much the point of the poems they wrote. To be clapped on the back. Celebrated. Turned into modern saints and martyrs.
 Curiouser and curiouser, thought Seamus, that a person, presented with what they wanted most, could seem so miserable about it.
 Along the upper wall of the seminar room, trapezoidal panes of glass. The room was all sleek, dark-wood beams and soaring windows, barnlike in its effect. Early afternoon sunshine pooling on the scuffed floors. Locked cases of books by writing program alumni who had gone on to midlist glory.
 The patina of prestige, so much like the corroded wax on the floorboards, had seen better days. That was the thing about prestige, though—the older and more moth eaten, the more valuable. There was a certain kind of poet for whom prestige was the point. The poetry was the prestige, and if no one saw you writing a poem, being a poet, then you were not a poet. For these poets, seminar was the zenith of their lives as artists. Never again would they have, on a weekly basis, such attention channeled upon their performance of poetry.
 “This poem really troubles notions of reliability. Because, like, who is more