"You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing: if you want to leave it in your diary or put it in a book. Yes, the experiences are intense but you have to allow yourself to go there, to cross that line."
At the heart of Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a counter-intuitive nostalgia for unbelonging. In his long form poem-cum-memoir, Brainard shares glimpses of his childhood and early adulthood that evoke lusty contradictions—the pleasure, pain, and curiosity of growing up different in America. It is a tribute to the self that survived, and the selves lost along the way.
In the same way Shane Allison’s own version of I Remember, published in 2012 by Future Tense Books, also evokes a sense of wonder, frustration, joy and sadness. Read More


