On Corral's "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" poems

These two poems invoke metaphor, as we have discussed, which beg us to ask the question, how is AIDS anything like those images presented in the poem? What connotations result from the various images that we encounter?

What types of ideas do you have about the juxtaposition of different images as seen in the first of the two poems (page 4-5)?

As a reader whose is intimately familiar with HIV/AIDS, having written extensively about my relationship to sexual practices using condoms, to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and to the relatively recent death of my great uncle to complications from AIDS, these two pieces stood out for their ability to reinvent gayness through the uniqueness of Corral’s vision. In the piece of writing I penned at the residency, it became clear these poems used metaphor as way of creating a disjunctive twisting of memory into the present. This is to say, in the dreamlike imaginings on AIDS, Corral is able to pull the memories of loss—whether it’s for communities or specific individuals remains unclear—from the virus into ways in which he (or better yet) his body can hold onto this loss as he dreams of new possibilities beyond it.