MY BODY IS PAPER

Poems and stories that capture a queer Chicano writer’s reckonings with illness, family, and desire in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

Composed in the years before the 34-year-old Cuadros’ death from AIDS in 1996, the works in this collection are embodied and energetic, charged with the urgency of a young writer racing to mine and document as much of his experience as possible. In “Hands,” the opening story, an AIDS patient prepares for his death, finalizing his will and getting rid of his belongings, grappling with unresolved childhood memories. Though the narrator’s body is deteriorating and he’s certain he’ll die soon, life keeps shattering through the gloom: While gardening, he receives “a warm charge…from the earth,” and he befriends an immigrant woman named Yoli whose warm, maternal character disrupts the resentment he harbors toward his abusive parents. This tension between degeneration and life, and between the divine and the profane, pervades the collection. An HIV-positive queer man finds himself pregnant in “Birth,” one of the last stories the author wrote. “Heroes,” which may have been the beginning of an unfinished novel, portrays moments of sexual intimacy as the narrator contends with the effects of illness and medical treatment on his body. Embodiment is vividly rendered throughout the pieces, especially in “Dis(coloration),” in which the narrator explores the cosmetics aisle of a drugstore and experiments with a new fading cream for his discolored skin. Spirituality is treated with equal importance, with speakers supplicating, grasping toward the divine in poems like “A Netless Heaven” and “It’s Friday Night and Jesus Is at the Laundromat.” Though there’s a brisk, unfinished quality to some of the stories (understandable, given the circumstances), this doesn’t overshadow their depth, detail, and poignancy. On the contrary, readers will easily recognize in these works a writer approaching the height of his powers. Brief essays by Justin Torres and Pablo Alvarez bookend the collection, contextualizing Cuadros’ life and writing.

A moving, necessary tribute to a singular voice of queer literature.