Jack Parlett, The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr

Jack Parlett's The Poetics of Cruising attempts to elucidate how cruising texts-from Whitman's early, daguerreotype-fixated verse to the Grindr poetics of Danez Smith's Homie (2020)-have been defined by acts of looking predicated by photography.It is then conspicuous that the book is devoid of photographic images.Cruising may well be a "profoundly optical phenomenon" ( 2), yet readers of Parlett's monograph must do without visual cues.The provision of some illustrative material would have been welcome, but the lack helpfully focuses attention on the ekphrastic tendencies-which Parlett deems vital-of the literary works under discussion.Moreover, it is a measure of how trenchant Parlett's analysis is of various cruising texts and their photographic and cinematic intertexts that his study succeeds, without visual aids, in articulating the complex optical erotics in the works of US authors such as Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, David Wojnarowicz, and Eileen Myles.Further, while recognizing the historically and geographically contingent nature of the cruising encounter, The Poetics of Cruising manages to delineate a distinctly queer literary endeavor which has continually interrogated what it means to look at a stranger, and the kinds of intimacies-revelatory, pleasurable, or shameful-that might result from such a look, whether returned or not.