The acknowledgments for Dead Boys in Space end with an apology: “thank you to the ghosts that live at the heart of this collection. I’m sorry you don’t get to read it. I’m sorry I had reason to write it.” As the title suggests, this is a collection about grief, both for an individual and for a whole cohort of people. Written from the perspective of a lesbian woman whose older brother was one of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS, Gregory’s poetry processes this loss through reflections on political struggle, contemporary queer community, and (especially) space travel.

As is often the way with grief, this processing is complicated. In an interview with The Poetry Bookshop blog, Gregory describes the collection as being interested in “the feeling of not-knowing, of not-remembering … of parsing through memories and stories and dreams that can only ever be secondhand.” Yet, for all the necessary complication of her subject matter, Gregory is never less than thoughtful and inventive. While it’s easy to share in her sorrow at writing the book, it’s also easy to be glad she did.

The collection begins with a standalone poem, “the only thing you need to know about him is that he’s not here,” which effectively lays out the book’s conceit:

I can’t suppose a world in which we meet
[…]
but I can suppose you
still alive.
Suppose, you, living on Mars.

The poetic voice’s fantasy is marked with oddball imagery: she imagines her brother “breathing diamonds/instead of air,” riding in a rocket “that looks like/your crotch.” But for all the science fiction weirdness, there’s a longing for more ordinary pleasures, as she pictures her brother “party[ing],” “sleep[ing] around,” and “nursing a drink.” The piece introduces the mix of personal desire and world-shaping grandiosity that will define the collection.

After this overture, the book is split into four sections. The first two deal with the rituals of grief, as well as the wider political context of the AIDS crisis. In “Eulogy,” the poetic voice describes how, decades after her brother’s death, “my father/mentions you/and each syllable/of your name/is a pearl/spirited/up from some/precious/sinking/grief.” These short lines help reinforce the sinking feeling they describe, the reading experience mirroring the quagmire of bereavement in which the poetic voice is caught. When the poem concludes “listen/there may be/a world/in which/your name/is never/again/spoken/but that/is not/this/world,” there is a sense of pride, but also of memory as a hard-fought accomplishment. It takes effort to maintain one’s connection with the dead, to reclaim them from the ever-encroaching present.

Other poems link the history of the AIDS crisis directly to other queer struggles. The poem “It used to be illegal for homosexuals to rest like this” begins with an intimate scene of the speaker “lying in bed with my girlfriend and a kitten” reading “David Wojnarowicz from shortly before his death.” Wojnarowicz’s writing prompts the speaker to contextualise herself among “the children of AIDS … our parents’ bastards of a disease that is still killing us and my god I miss the elders I have never known.” From here she moves into contemporary manifestations of homophobia and transphobia:

my open hands are an open target and did you see the news lately?
all bathroom bills and bedroom bans? or how the cost of PrEP
makes us laugh? the only thing queer that hasn’t gone pop

The repetition of “open” underlines the poetic voice’s vulnerability in an increasingly hostile environment for queer people (one that Gregory herself has helped to document). But the bitter humour of the last two sentences marks a segue into a more threatening image:

( imagine here the long sharp teeth of gorgeous women who
will never pass )

“It used to be illegal for homosexuals to rest like this” is one of a number of poems to interpolate the wider literature of the AIDS crisis. Jon Greenberg, Caro De Robertis, and Paul Monette are among the book’s other credited inspirations. The poem’s sense of building out, from historical engagement to potentially militant reaction, also informs the collection’s centrepiece, the fifteen-page prose poem that takes up the entirety of section three: “One Million Dead Men: An Empirical Investigation Into New Sodom.”

Presented as the transcript of a lecture by a nameless “PROFESSOR” to the “Center for the Study of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration” in the year 2577, “One Million Dead Men” lays out a fascinating alternate history. In this timeline, the space race culminated not with the Apollo missions, but with the establishment of a Lunar Base, to which “[a]n estimated 1.6 million homosexual men aged 24 to 44 were successfully displaced … between 1981 and 1996.” The Professor frames this mass deportation as a successful handling of the AIDS crisis, arguing that “the lunar colonization did effectively wipe out the entire homosexual male population in the United States.” The piece works to satirise the intertwining of homophobia and imperialism, as the Professor admires the “genius” of deploying “a population with an expiration date and no possibility of procreation” to manage the moon colony. This deportation effort is said to involve “surveillance … separation from loved ones … riots … human rights complaints and/or violations.” But the Professor glosses over these atrocities, saying that “these alleged complaints fall outside the scope of my research,” betraying the cruelty of supposedly disinterested historical accounts.

And yet the inhabitants of “New Sodom” do not behave as expected. As the Professor puts it, “once they touched down on lunar surface, not a single gay man died of AIDS.” Despite their government overseers relying on them to die to make the base “ready for its true occupants,” the men of the Lunar Base seem to thrive, until all of them, “for some unknown reason … decided to die together.” The Professor describes a later expedition which finds a scene of Mary Celeste-style abandonment: “there were no dead bodies to be found on the Moon Colony. The greenhouses were overgrown jungles. The showers were still hot, the saunas still steaming.” The implication (though the Professor is murdered before he can make it explicit) is that the gay men of the Lunar Base have escaped, leaving behind a world of homophobia to forge a new destiny for themselves. “One Million Dead Men” is an audacious piece of science fiction, its satirical brio opening up a liberatory vision of the future.

In its fourth and final section, the book returns to the smaller scale. In “As Super Moon,” the poetic voice once again looks up at the night sky and thinks of her brother:

He’s there, in the sky, not squinting back
[…]
He’s happy
younger than me now
when did that happen?

This section’s melancholy is tempered by a sense of joy in contemporary queer life. In “The center of the universe is a small-town gay bar,” the speaker meets a new partner on a crowded dance floor, and Gregory renders the scene with tenderness and intimacy:

I felt someone new press by in slacks there was water beading on her shoulders like a birthmark her chest was bound and her hair was short and she didn’t touch my hem which is how I knew she wanted to and how I knew she was for me

The single unpunctuated sentence and the lack of line breaks reinforce the crush of the crowd; yet the attention to small, intimate details like the pattern of water on her dance partner’s shoulders demonstrates the poetic voice’s attraction to this new face. That sense of being absorbed, both in a dancing crowd and in the presence of one particular dancer, continues later in the poem:

we didn’t speak we danced I was pushy and she pushed back and then we found our rhythm she snapped my damp tights between her thumb and forefinger and I laughed which sounded like nothing over the music or maybe like I opened my mouth and became music I read her lips and she said you have the smallest teeth I’ve ever seen which is not a compliment exactly but something that instead says I am looking at you hard which is all that matters when the music is so good and the lights follow no particular patterns

The two dancers’ lightly antagonistic pushing gives way to a sublime absorption. The voicelessness that elsewhere marks oppressive homophobia is here recast as joy in communal art, as the speaker becomes music, the detail of her small teeth the kind of weird observation that could only apply to a single person. The speaker is simultaneously depersonalised and closely observed; contextualised and distinct; part of a community and loved for who she is. “The center of the universe is a small-town gay bar” is one of the finest poems in the collection: a celebration of queer intimacy in a hostile, alienating context. Yet some of its power derives from its placement in this collection—one which confronts the brutal facts of history and uses them to power its own strange fabulations. Dead Boys in Space is a poetry collection with which to forge a new world.