Growing up Roman Catholic in Los Angeles to a single mother from Costa Rica, Ruben Quesada has lived in more than a dozen homes and written numerous books. His latest work, Brutal Companion (Barrow Street, 2024), the winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize, is a book Quesada cites as his most difficult and honest project. Brutal Companion reckons with Quesada’s 2016 HIV diagnosis, which he has not spoken about publicly until now. The collection addresses a sweeping mythology that crosses the plains of loss and grief, where friends, lovers, mothers, and public figures provide an examination into the speaker’s fear of his own impending death. Reflecting on ancient and contemporary works as well as modern media, Quesada provides the reader with a portal into his intimate thoughts about diagnosis and loss. From Plato’s Symposium to Cab Calloway to Leochares to Mr. Ed, Quesada’s poetry crosses decades, geographies, and artistic movements to provide insight into what it means to seek intimacy. The speaker is a queer person, HIV-positive, a son with an aging mother, a drug addict, and a human being facing the certainty that one day life will end.
I spoke with Ruben Quesada over Zoom about familial expectations, artistic influences, and what it means to face one’s own mortality.
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The Rumpus: You open the collection with “Terminology,” a poem that muses on the future death of the speaker’s mother. It sets a very particular tone: death and loss are with us well before they occur. Is this poem the opener for this reason?
Ruben Quesada: The opening line of the collection is “My mother is going to die.” By the time we get to the end of the collection, the final poem is this revelation that the mother has died, so it comes full circle. I started the collection with “Terminology” because I thought it captured that idea of grief and longing in a multifaceted way. I’m not just thinking about the loss of my mother, I’m also thinking about the loss of a lover and thinking about the way we experience loss through different degrees of intimacy. This is something I engage with often throughout the collection, and this poem serves as a microcosm of everything that’s going to develop.
My mother is still alive, but I’m always thinking about the impending loss because she is older. That’s something that I feel like I’ve carried with me, and it’s a type of guilt because I’ve moved so far away from her because I don’t see her as often—I may see her once a year if that. It feels in many ways like I’m transitioning toward that loss. I draw from ancient ideas—I mention Aristophanes, and the reference I make is from Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes is someone in Plato’s stories who talks about the origin of love, which is this mythological idea that human beings were once two beings together, back-to-back, and [then] they were split. So we spend our entire lives trying to find that other half we were separated from. I thought that [myth] applied well, not just to a lover, and the probability of losing a lover but for something deeper, like a family member. It felt right to open that way, with my mother. It was a good establishing moment for the book.
Rumpus: For a collection so fraught with depictions of grief and loss, why did you choose to center the speaker’s mother? Why begin and end this collection with her?
Quesada: Why imagine my mother’s death? Why place her in this situation? I was raised by my mother. She left Costa Rica, emigrated to the United States with my two older sisters, and left my father and her family behind. She has always been central to my life. She’s everything. Imagining her loss is unimaginable. When I was diagnosed with HIV, my first thought was, “What will my mother think?” I received my diagnosis on my mother’s birthday. The diagnosis was complicated by so many emotions that seemed to always go back to my mother. One thing she would always tell me, after I came out, was: “Be careful.” Ultimately, I believe my mother was afraid I would acquire HIV. So when I did, I didn’t know how I was going to tell her. I knew I wanted to tell her.
This idea of putting my mother in this situation, an impending death, in the book, in many ways is self-projection. I’m imagining my own mortality. The most tangible way for me to think about that is to think about the impending death of the person closest to me, which might sound a little morbid or unusual, but I haven’t had a lot of death in my life. You may not imagine, from this collection, that I’ve only experienced the deaths of a couple of people close to me. So, to think about death is something that is almost ungraspable, because I haven’t had that much experience with it.
This [HIV] diagnosis and the impending loss of my mother, both in the book and real life, are the closest I’ve had death around me. Thinking about the loss of my mother is a lot like thinking about the loss of my own life. It seemed like a good way to think about death—how am I going to negotiate the loss of my mother, and it may be the best way for me to contextualize the potential loss of my own life.
Rumpus: You were diagnosed in 2016 but have never spoken publicly until now, with the publication of this book. Why now?
Quesada: My mother was raised in the 1950s in another country, but I don’t think that geography is all that much different than US sensibilities of what it meant to be a particular gender or what it meant to navigate the world in a particular manner. Growing up, I was expected to follow certain gender norms and expectations that my mother had—we were raised Roman Catholic, so religion guided my mother in how she raised me and my sisters. Because of this, I’ve always been reserved, or cautious, about the things I share publicly. I think that’s come across in many ways, through social media or my work before this book. I would call it “safe.”
My early work was worldly observations—poems you might expect about people and places, and mundane reflections about the world. But the poems in this book confront things that have been much more difficult in my life. A lot of these poems are about these experiences that come with the territory of living in the world we live in today. We’re so much more exposed to loss globally, and so in thinking about how all this loss, how did we get here, I turn to my past but also to a public past. I address the loss of a lot of public figures that I was alive or around to see. I wanted to address all the things that I was witness to or that may have informed my understanding of loss. Part of that was being raised in an environment that was homophobic and associated HIV/AIDS with death. I grew up in the 1990s, when having that diagnosis was a death sentence. So, I grew up fearing sex, HIV, and death, as it relates to having the identity of a queer person. Being queer meant that that life would eventually lead me to death. That’s because of how I was raised, not just because that’s what my family believed, but the culture informed their understanding. I’ve lived with that stigma my entire life.
As an adult, I have had the privilege of meeting people with HIV who know people who have died from AIDS. It’s something I’ve dealt with, more directly, as an adult, [the subject] I was taught to avoid as a child. I feel a lot of these poems are clear-eyed. The experiences I’ve had as an adult have helped me understand what it means to have HIV and what it means to be a queer person in the world.
I turn to a lot of media in my poems to witness what the world was exposed to. I try to engage with real people and real situations to try to make sense of that stigma. And I think I’ve become much more comfortable with being a queer person and someone with HIV. Having HIV is still very new to me, and I’m still learning how to talk about it, but these poems have helped me accept my diagnosis and come to terms with it, so it felt like I needed to confront that, to confront myself. The reason it felt right to write about it now is I feel I have a community of people I can talk to. In my private life, it’s become easier to talk about these ideas, and having this community around me made it easier to write about.
Rumpus: Chicago is something of a character in its own right in this collection, which makes sense, considering you live there. Do you feel that Chicago, or a greater notion of physical place, acts as a symbol or motif of larger themes?
Quesada: It’s interesting how much you notice place in the book. Where I’ve lived is going to inform what I write about—I write about Chicago because I live in Chicago—but I’ve never considered myself a Chicago writer. The longer I live here, the more I find myself writing about it. My previous work has so much of Los Angeles in it, because I grew up there. I’ve been described as a “poet of place,” and I don’t try to be. There are some places I reference that are more in reference to the people in the poem, like Salt Lake for example. That other has often been a lover, so that’s how those places come into the world of this book. I’ve always wanted to find roots in a place, and I think I’ve found that here in Chicago.
My observations of place are informed not just because I’ve lived there but because I’m trying to capture and hold onto the different places that have come into my life. I don’t think I’ve ever felt I’ve had a place to call home. So, those observations are about places that have made an impression on me. I think I’m always trying to make sense of the place I’m in.
Rumpus: The collection takes a lot of influence from the art world, specifically Magritte, Chagall, and Bruegel. Visual artists are not the only members of other mediums you make reference to. A quote from the jazz musician, Cab Calloway, opens “On Aging.” Several poems reference Greek and Roman mythology. What is the motivation to include so many multi-disciplinary influences? What about the connection between your poetics and these works felt crucial for this collection?
Quesada: I’m glad you asked about that. Initially, I expected this to be a collection of ekphrastic poetry. I even got a grant to travel to different museums to write these poems. Seeing artwork firsthand gets me so excited! I didn’t grow up with it, so it always feels so fresh to me to be around not just historical figures, but in a place that honors art. It’s a lot like going to a library: an archive of singular creations. One thing I find engaging about visual art is that it functions as a portal. Sometimes I’ll write about what’s literally in the painting, but most of the time what I’ll take from a work of art is a starting point to explore the mood or theme of the artwork. Those themes, or that mood, opens a door for me to unlock my imagination, and engage with things I wouldn’t otherwise have an inroad to.
There’s a poem I wrote, after Turner, called, “Angels in the Sun.” The poem itself is on a painting. It’s an apocalyptic portrayal of the archangel Michael, a moment from Revelation in the Bible. It allowed me to think not only about myself and my internal feelings, my thoughts about religion or sexual identity or technology; it allowed me to speak about my own religious experiences and feelings about the afterlife. Visual art reminds us of humanity—not just what is depicted but [our] relationship to what is being depicted: “What did this artwork allow me to see about myself?” The final poem was based on an artwork of a fortune teller reading someone’s palm, and it allowed me to bring that character to life.
Rumpus: When reading this collection, I kept thinking of Tim Dlugos’s [poem] “G-9” and other queer artists who felt it personally and culturally crucial to document not only the HIV/AIDS epidemic but the gay experience of their era, in general. In the third section of your book, you gravitate toward a historiography of sorts—Matthew Shepard, the Stonewall Riots, Daniel V. Jones. It’s not just queerness in these references, or death, but this force of rebellion, of revolution. That, “If loss must be inevitable, let us make it mean something.” Why did you choose these events, or people, for reference? What was your intention?
Quesada: I’m happy you were drawn to those figures. It’s very important for me to think about the loss of these individuals. It’s important that it means something because these were all figures who passed away during my lifetime. A lot of these figures were from the 1980s and ’90s, when I was a kid. In the case of Daniel V. Jones, I saw that happen on television. I grew up in Los Angeles, so car chases happened all the time, and the news would broadcast them. I would see it happen live. I have very clear, vivid memories of watching that. I didn’t understand what was going on—I didn’t understand why—but I knew in this incident something was different from those other car chases. [Jones] unfurled this banner on a freeway overpass that said, “HMO’s are in it for the money!! Live free, love safe or die.” I remember seeing him take his life. It’s a memory that has stuck with me, and eventually I figured it out. It seemed so important to me to figure it out. People like Daniel V. Jones or R. Budd Dwyer or Rock Hudson, figures who lost their lives because of stigma or because they felt like they had no other choice but to take their own life. We know queer people take their lives at a higher rate because of social stigma, or because of people like Anita Bryant, who vilify queer people. So it’s become really important to me to think about, and to highlight these people. I don’t want people to forget. I don’t want people to forget them.
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Author photograph by Volkan Photography
