On Saturday, Oct. 12, Karl Tierney’s literary executor, Jim Cory, will appear at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mount Airy to talk about Karl, read from the book of poems — Have You Seen This Man ( Sibling Rivalry Press) — and answer questions. The reading/presentation starts at 7 PM. Big Blue Marble is located 551 Carpenter Lane in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia. To get there from Center City, take the Chestnut Hill West six stops to Carpenter Lane and the store is a five minute walk down the street. Jim is a resident of Center City, Philadelphia.
Jim’s an old friend and I’ll be introducing him at the bookstore. This is a version of a review that is forthcoming from This Way Out, the international queer radio syndicate.
When I began reading Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (2019 Sibling Rivalry Press), I thought the poems of Karl Tierney might be tragic, but instead found them tragically funny – in a way that often makes the soul snicker. I thought the poetry might be tragic because they were brought to us by tragic circumstances. The editor was friend and literary executor of the author Karl Tierney who in 1994 became sick with AIDs and took his own life in 1995 when he was 39-years old. The editor, Jim Cory, is a noted poet and essayist in his own right.
Tierney never had a book published during his lifetime, but his poems were published in auspicious places such as the American Poetry Review and Exquisite Corpse.
Karl Tierney as a poet also had his serious side. In the poem “Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas,” he adopts Gertrude’s voice and writes in part of the poem:
Our car is …beautiful and blue
and we are beautiful and not blue
and we are fast driving
and do not feel a bit dangerous or dirty.
We have the radio on
In his poems about gay life in San Francisco where he lived, Karl turned his keen poetic observations on life around him. In “Adonis At The Swimming Pool,” Karl starts with:
“Who dances his thighs across the pool’s water,
spread on a mattress bloated from his breath.
Whose ripe-with-sun skin cuts through the spray
With the alingual grace of a kiss to my brow.”
….
And ends with:
“Whose wet curls stroke the evening’s earliest gasp
into naughty tones and murmurs of lust.
Who would have me discussed in seedy cafés
and ruin me since I’m deaf to this hiss
behind the teeth in that insipid smile.”
From Tierney’s take on “lipstick lesbians,” MacDonna, and gay life in the Castro at a certain point in time, I found Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (from Sibling Rivalry Press) to be a page-turner of a good read.
Janet Mason, author 