Reality programming comes to free verse with Lesbian Trapped in a Man's Body. Using real speech, dramatic situations, and a no-holds-barred approach, Daly tells the story of a Yankee songwriter seeking his fortune in Nashville. He fights to survive the usual stuff: interracial lust, betrayal, schoolgirl crushes, heavy drinking, gay love, kinky chicks, and your cheatin' heart. Applying the techniques he learned as an ad writer and songwriter, first-time author Brian Daly disdains the arid, academic style and goes for the throat. And he's funny, too.
America's Least Beloved Poet
Brian Daly was born on Long Island in 1952 and grew up there and in central Massachusetts. He won a scholarship to Dartmouth, where he pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon and lived in the frat house across from Baker Library.
At Dartmouth, he met Richard Eberhart and Allen Ginsberg and won the Lockwood Prize in writing but finished near the bottom of this class. "Thank God for the hockey players!" he says.
After graduation, be built a geodesic dome and lived there for five years, writing songs and a few of the poems that appear in this book. Then he moved to Nashville and pitched his songs without success.
In 1983, he bought a birthday card for a friend and taped a poem to the inside. The poem was "Thirty-Gurdy," which became the first poem in Lesbian Trapped in a Man's Body.
Daly finished the first draft of Lesbian in 1987 with a series of poems about the birth of his son. Since then, he's edited the collection--his first--with help from the Dreadfulites, a Nashville poetry circle he joined in 1995.
Along the way, his poems have appeared in some of the nation's best alternative poetry magazines, including Pearl, Chiron Review, Poetry Motel, Nerve Bundle Review, and others.
His controversial themes, blunt language, and insensitivity to others have earned him a reputation as "the least beloved poet in America." He's also been called "Robert Frost with a penis" because of his casual yet polished style and his frequent reference to sex.
Says Dreadfulites founder C Ra McGuirt, "Good poetry is primarily concerned with the dance of words. It avoids intentional obtuseness, moral posturing, emotional caterwauling, and blatant self-aggrandizement." Asked how he prepared his book for publication, Daly says, "I took out everything that sounded like poetry."
Lesbian Trapped in a Man's Body is a ride you won't soon forget.
