Titles / [Exeunt.] by Raymond Luczak
[Exeunt.]
by Raymond Luczak
Forthcoming
March 3, 2026
$20.00
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In Raymond Luczak’s [Exeunt.], we experience not only how an individual can continue to love through their grief, but also through the deeper history of the AIDS epidemic that devastated the gay community in the 1980s and 90s. These poems are frank and sexual and harrowing, and even sometimes funny, elegizing the gay friends, the queer heroes, and the stories you haven’t heard. [Exeunt.] spotlights the complicated brilliance in all of this. As much as Luczak’s work honors a specific time, it also resonates with our endurance of a more recent pandemic handled poorly by the administration. [Exeunt.] explores in depth what it meant to survive the AIDS epidemic then and what it means to be a gay man now in the face of so much loss.
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 37 titles, including Animals Out-There W-i-l-d: A Bestiary in English and ASL Gloss, Ironhood: Poems, and I'll Tell You Later: Deaf Survivors of Dinner Table Syndrome. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. An inaugural Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow, Luczak lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I didn’t feel / up to the task / of queer reinvention” Raymond Luczak writes, while charting language-maps navigating HIV, discrimination, living in a hearing world as a “deaf white boy / who didn’t want / to be a sissy / from Michigan’s / Upper Peninsula.” These are poems, written in the 2020s, reflecting on the 1980s, with possibilities and pandemics. Erotic (“i want to skinny-dip in the blue waves of your eyes”) and aching (“How I long to be coated in nettles / so he could again heal me all night long”) these poems articulate desire and determination from a poet whose work opens up communication, Sign, sex, masculinity and survival.
—Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry Unbound and Kitchen Hymns
Luczak’s exquisite collection [Exeunt.] calls us to remembrance. In Luczak’s hand death, the unassailable wound, delivers for the living and the dead. Every ode escorts us into the heart of a haunting enmeshed to the love(s) that authored it. The sum of these poems convey AIDS and loss for all they take, can also grow us bigger perhaps than we could ever have known we needed to be. Luczak writes death lay there, scarcely sleeping, in the coffin of my bed/ while at night I thought about my need to love/ a man as was my ache to be loved as I am.Luczak’s [Exeunt.] is an elixir that gathers our fears and our hearts just close enough to let them show this ache to be loved as we truly are—regardless who or what we call ourselves—belongs to every single one of us. Luczak’s capacious language blooms resilient enough to remind us: the lust, the love, the desire, the sex, the longing, the grief—the whole of it—depends on us truly being human. And in the well of our humanity grief and loss and love are part of the order of things. This book is expert gorgeous brilliance.
—Brad Walrond, author of Every Where Alien
Luczak’s poems explore how we enter and leave one another’s lives. This collection transforms the idea of exeunt, the stage direction for departure, into a lens for understanding love and loss. Set in Washington D.C. and New York City during the height of the AIDS crisis, these poems remember a generation of friends, visionaries, and lovers whose roles and impact shine a spotlight even on the darkest of sets. Most of Luczak’s poems are dedicated or inspired by departed men that he brings alive with sensual detail and emotional clarity. Every exit carries loss, and these poems are the curtain call that a quiet beauty remains.
—Steven Reigns, author of A Quilt for David and Outliving Michael
In Exeunt, Raymond Luczak chronicles his companions, comrades, and guides who have departed the stage, evoking and invoking their characters with vividness, wit, and heart. “Learning to love/ghosts in their original flesh,” he populates his pages with “names written in the guestbook of my body.” But even if poetry can’t bring back our lost ones to join us in bed or at the café table, they can “live in a land of perpetual almost”—as they do in Exeunt, a lament that summons us to the dramas of lives profoundly recalled.
—David Groff, author of Live in Suspense