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The second poetry collection from Queer Poz (PLHIV) writer and performance-maker.
In Act Cute, the poet addresses the gap between memory and the present, and asks how to perform a coherent self amidst the forces of nostalgia, institutional entanglements and reckonings, and queer desiring. Shifting between autofictive address and canonical personae, the structural codes of romantic drama uneasily frame the poet-as-actor through five sections, titled ‘Audition Sides’, ‘you stop me at the airport and tell me that you love me’, ‘twink death in Europa!!’, ‘Wedding Scenes’ and ‘forgiveness’.
Author: Andrew Sutherland
Paperback Published 1 July 2025 128 pages
‘It is a rare book of poetry that makes you feel as though you are being reconstituted as, reading, you assemble its words into lines – Act Cute is one of these. Perhaps because of its focus on character in all forms, but particularly from the perspective of the actor and theatre-maker.’ Caitlin Maling
‘Act Cute alchemises the body personal into the political – revealing the blurred lines of play and power, desire and distance, meet cutes and lonely aesthetics; the exquisite contradictions we carry, refracting the ordinary into a collection of poems that is startling, luminous, and deeply alive.’ Sara M. Saleh