The Poetics of Cruising Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr

"The Poetics of Cruising is a thoughtfully researched and rigorous examination of the literary pleasures of sex in public across two centuries. Jack Parlett examines the poetics and politics of cruising, a queerly ekphrastic practice, at the intersections of gender, race, and class. Moving between past and present, words and images, close reading and close looking, The Poetics of Cruising explores the enduring appeal of cruising without nostalgia."-Fiona Anderson, author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

"The Poetics of Cruising is an innovative, astute, and highly readable account of the intersections of gay life, visuality, and poetics in the work of important gay writers from Walt Whitman to David Wojnarowicz. Analyzing unpublished materials alongside literary texts, The Poetics of Cruising-a model of how to combine history, theory, and close reading-is a fascinating and beautifully written account of cruising as a practice, aesthetic, and methodology."-Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State University