Patrick Kindig, Agape

 

MENELAUS

When Telemachus and Pisistratus arrive, Menelaus is overjoyed. They drink & drink & he tells war stories, talks about Odysseus. He leans against Telemachus’ shoulder & tells him he looks like his father. When Menelaus begins to compliment Telemachus’ arms, his wife looks away. By midnight Menelaus is very drunk & Telemachus & Pisistratus are tired so they excuse themselves & find their way to the guest room. Undressed, they fall asleep.

Pisistratus does not wake until morning. Telemachus wakes only once in the dark, a little drunk, something warm pressed against his thigh.

When the run rises Menelaus is still asleep & his wife serves them breakfast & does not look at them. Pisistratus recounts a dream in which his horse was stolen. Telemachus does not say anything. They pack their bags & leave without seeing Menelaus & soon they are home again. When Telemachus, days later, unpacks his bag, something unfamiliar falls out. It is a coin purse, red & full of money. Try as he might, he cannot close its mouth.

There is much to admire in the smart, sharp and tender poems of Maryland poet Patrick Kindig’s latest full-length collection, Agape (Broomall PA: Saturnalia Books, 2026), winner of the Saturnalia Books Alma Award. This is a collection that follows Kindig’s Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016), all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and fascinations (Finishing Line Press, 2025), as well as the monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (LSU Press, 2022). There feels an element of New York School Frank O’Hara’s first-person declarations, tender gestures, cultural references and sharp observations through Kindig’s lyrics, but with an element of sly humour, one closer to the wry lyrics of Toronto poet Marcus McCann, especially through their shared lyric, one more overtly physical, erotic, queer and classical. As the poem “TENDERNESS FOR TRISTAN” begins: “there is a boy & a girl & another / boy. the two boys like to wrestle / & drink vodka after dark. they talk / about visiting amsterdam next summer / for the usual reasons. they have rules / for what will happen if they / are in a threesome. the girl // is sometimes ther but she is always / in the background. when the boys / wrestle, she watches.” Composing precise lines rippled with a musical flow and ease, Kindig’s humour is quiet, even unobtrusive, until something finally breaks through the surface, offering poems that return, once more, to the subject of the attraction between two men. Listen, for example, to the opening to the poem “ROBERT FROST SAYS NOTHING GOLD / CAN STAY,” as Kindig offers an alternate consideration upon the familiar, writing: “but Robert Frost clearly never tried / to clean dog piss out of carpet. // Which is to say: dog piss is / forever. It settles in, makes a home // for itself of whatever soft thing / it touches.”

Through an array of mythical and literary figures, Kindig writes origins and old gods; Biblical and classical tales told and retold, shaped from alternate perspectives. Kindig writes encounters with and through Adam, Daniel, Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s Romeo, Dido and Aeneas, Tristan and Menelaus, offering alternate versions of familiar tales, and seeing what else might have occurred beneath the skin of what has long been told. “& he loved adam in ways to which adam / was unaccustomed,” begins the poem “& IN THE GARDEN, TOO, THERE WAS A / SECOND MAN, & HE WAS LONELY,” “raising, & re-raising the matter // of his groin, what grew there, drawing attention / to his nakedness & the way this nakedness // pleased him, & whenever eve found them together / he would tell her they were wrestling, & indeed // they were always wrestling, [.]”