Available at Amazon and Bookshop.org

 COACHELLA ELEGY

LitHub’s “Favorite Poetry Collections of the Year”

“These cool, elegantly controlled poems are about struggling to find peace in a frightening world.”

-Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club  

“Gullette brings a crystalline, queer vantage point to a legendary corpus of Californian chronicles.”

-Virginia Konchan, Poetry Foundation

“There is something spare and trance-like in Christian Gullette’s mesmerizing Coachella Elegy. The source of the intensity, as in many of the landscapes Gullette describes, is gradation and precision, tremors of warning rather than full-on earthquakes. The subjects are raw. A brother’s death. The speaker’s husband’s ocular cancer. The landscape’s diminishing wildness in a tremulous, post-AIDS California. I admire Coachella Elegy’s refinement, its nuanced approach to deep emotion. I feel the tremors in my bones.” —DIANE SEUSS

“In restless, miraculous poems, Christian Gullette turns his gaze to a California haunted by memory and mortality. Wandering in the desert, commuting between San Francisco and poolside paradises, his wise and moving debut, Coachella Elegy, is a spiritual autobiography in verse—in which hot sun and bright pleasures are stays against loss.” —RICHIE HOFMANN

“There is something at once elegant and seething about Coachella Elegy, its cool eroticism and poolside betrayals. Christian Gullette upends diction and expectation, his sculptures ‘ironic,’ his landscape a discourse where ‘wind in palms signals / a desert revising itself into dusk.’ Like Thom Gunn, Gullette hides in plain sight—between the lines, subtle grief all the more grievous. The poems in Coachella Elegy are gorgeous, sinister, and clear as water.” —RANDALL MANN