Karl Tierney was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Connecticut and Louisiana. He became an Eagle Scout in 1973. Poetry fascinated him, even as a teenager. He received a Bachelor's Degree in English from Emory University in 1980 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1983. That same year, he moved to San Francisco, where he dedicated himself to poetry. He was twice a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a 1992 fellow at Yaddo. Though unpublished in book form during his lifetime, his poems appeared in many of the best literary magazines of the period, including the Berkeley Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He published more than 50 poems in magazines and anthologies before his death. In December of 1994 he became sick with AIDS and took his own life in October of 1995 by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. He was 39 years old.
The book that Karl Tierney didn't live to see has now been published nearly a quarter century after his tragic death. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is a witty, biting, well-crafted time machine to another era and a reminder of the talent and promise of a generation of artists taken from us too soon by HIV/AIDS.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? is the second title in the Arkansas Queer Poet Series as published by Sibling Rivalry Press.
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"I met Karl Tierney in the 80s, when we were both in Bob Gluck's legendary gay men's workshop held in the back room of Small Press Traffic, in San Francisco's Noe Valley. That workshop, like most back rooms, made for instant intimacy. Have You Seen This Man?, skillfully edited and introduced by Jim Cory, shows us the full range of Karl's talents. Despite its mordant provenance this is a fun book, radiant with emotive power." - KEVIN KILLIAN
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"Reading Karl Tierney's collection is like entering a portal into San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, a time when it was still dirty and sexy and alive, even as men across the city were dying. With sharp intimacy, Tierney's poems had me laughing and crying in recognition for all that we lost. And I'm deeply grateful to the editor and publisher for rescuing his work from the dustbins of history. This is vital reading." - ALYSIA ABBOTT
The expansive, posthumous debut from Tierney (1956-1995) considers the myriad ways that everyday experience is politically charged. "It's not easy to propel one's spirit through this/ nocturnal society," he warns, as he documents and humanizes the AIDS crisis. "You won't have to think yourself a victim," he writes, "of talentless pretty-/ boy actors who become Presidents after losing their looks." Though unified by their revolutionary sensibility, the poems in this historically significant volume broach an impressive array of challenging subjects, among them death, acts of God, and vanity. This capacious sensibility allows him to achieve a complex portrait of the community for which he advocates: "Words like lesion, bile, pneumocystis have battled and won over your tongue," he writes in "After His Death." Much of the work proves as formally conservative as it is groundbreaking in its content, and this pairing of sensibilities proves highly readable. "I lose myself in conforming," Tierney writes, as though reflecting on the docile presentation of these politically charged narratives. This book provides an overdue introduction to an important voice in American poetry. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW
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Have You Seen This Man? is staunchly against the possibility of forgetting: not only what happened and who died and how it felt but also how some of those in power who withheld care and compassion are still revered. But Tierney also reminds us that, despite mass death and suffering, despite terminal diagnoses and an entire queer way of life changing forever, life continued. Tierney's poetry offers a language of everyday resistance, of continuing to be oneself despite even the most apocalyptic forces. All of us are alive, after all--even the sickest and most threatened--until we aren't. - POETRY FOUNDATION
