Don't Leave Me This Way

Eric Sneathen is a poet and queer literary historian living in Oakland. He is the author of Snail Poems (Krupskaya, 2016) and Don't Leave Me This Way (Nightboat Books, 2023). With Lauren Levin, he edited Honey Mine (Nightboat Books, 2021), the selected fictions of Camille Roy.

"From the salty, gorgeous fragmented segments of the opening section, Telemachy, to the slurping and fucking of a Dugas section—Sneathen artfully and archly builds something urgent, erotic, elegiac, and vitally archival." —LitHub, Best New Poetry"To spend time with [Don't Leave Me This Way] is an immense gift, as the poems continue to surprise and reveal themselves anew to me— it is as if upon each reading, a new texture of signification and history becomes apparent. . . brilliant."—Ted Rees, bæst"Don't Leave Me This Way is gripping, erotic, tender, and heartbreaking. . . a symphony of sex and bodies." —Book Binch"I am deeply pleased to see a new poetry title by Oakland, California 'poet and queer literary historian' Eric Sneathen... shared blend of first-person narrative, wild energy and lyric experimentation, simultaneous sense of joy and impending doom, queer content and the AIDS crisis, and for their use of deeply person biographical material." —rob mclennan's blog"Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet’s 'promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,' this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature’s bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle." —Brian Teare"These beautiful, searing poems give us angels of history with bodies. They move in and out  of its rubble, finding and losing themselves in pasts that are at once erotic, heartbreaking, and comforting—always flashing up words that arrest the reader." —Elizabeth Freeman"These beautiful, searing poems give us angels of history with bodies. They move in and out  of its rubble, finding and losing themselves in pasts that are at once erotic, heartbreaking, and comforting—always flashing up words that arrest the reader." —Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué"Snipped and pasted together, this cacophony of voices becomes a strangely coherent vision of a fantastical, phantasmagoric, and deliciously filthy sexual bacchanalia—or as coherent as any hazily remembered snapshots after a debaucherous night out."Emily Colucci, Filthy Dreams