From the beloved author of 100
Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic
memoir in verse.
In Ten Bridges
I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and
overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye
for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability
to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first
collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his
peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil
within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,”
Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
The thirty-eight
autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt
find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious
brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with
packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the
curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members;
and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising
misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything
from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and
the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
With the same
balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a
sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing
writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and
thrilling as the author himself.