Rhapsody in D

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Rhapsody in D announces its gay male literary content with a cover
drawing of a naked man playing a beribboned tambourine. Winnipeg
bookseller Todd Bruce is “open” in every sense of the word: honest
about his homosexuality and eager to demonstrate its effects on his
imagination. Writing this book, he says, was “an escape from the
reality of my partner’s dying.” Although the collection is
admittedly therapeutic, the author serves his readers as he heals
himself.

Bruce defines “rhapsody” as “[a] literary work consisting of
miscellaneous or disconnected pieces.” In these prose-poems,
soft-focus sentiment is mixed with hard-core erotica. This raises the
question of what sort of readers are attracted by such phrases as
“tiara of thyme” and “[t]he semen splashes onto my belly.”
Despite such phrases, the author reaches out to heterosexual readers in
“Bishops and Queens,” which features a railroad bar encounter
between a Brazilian woman and the gay narrator.

Will poetry inspired by the universal emotion of grief attract
“mainstream” readers to gay male erotica? It is up to readers and
critics to judge this book’s risky balancing act.