Pádraig Ó Tuama, LOVE BETWEEN MEN

 

Makebelieve

And on the first day
God made
something up.
Then everything came along: 

Seconds, sex and
beasts and breath and rabies;
hunger, healing,
lust and lust’s rejections;
swarming things that swarm
inside the dirt;
girth and grind
and grit and shit and all shit’s functions;
rings inside the tree trunk
and branches broken by the snow;
pigs’ hearts and stars,
mystery, suspense and stingrays;
insects, blood
and interests and death;
eventually, us
with all our viruses, laments, and curiosities;
all our songs and stories;
and our songs about the stories we’ve forgotten;
and all that we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten. 

God looked for something
to hold it all together. Nothing
came to mind.

The latest from Irish poet, theologian and conflict mediator Pádraig Ó Tuama is LOVE BETWEEN MEN (Copper Canyon Press, 2026), a collection of lyric narratives around queer love, Old Testament figures, desire and “his own experiences of exorcisms and gay reparation therapies, exploring desire with its promise and fear of fulfillment.” Threading rage and love, sex and trauma, Ó Tuama’s narrative layerings rewriting the possibilities of what love might be and might offer, beyond the fear of those who choose to call homosexuality a sin, or whitewash the damage caused through conversion therapy. “I share my secret with a man who wants to be / my mentor.” Ó Tuama writes, to close the poem “Adam & Eve not Adam & Steve,” “We arrange to meet twice weekly // for accountability and chat. He says I must have been / abused, that dudes don’t turn out queer without // traumatic pasts. He grabs my balls, slaps my ass, / laughs it off, says all straight lads do this.” I’m fascinated by how Ó Tuama’s background and work as a theologian (including the fact that he currently teaches at Yale Divinity School) informs his work, as he composes poems around Adam and Eve, God and other Old Testament threads, offering a conversation around queer love and Biblical narratives far different from the book-length suites of Maryland poet Patrick Kindig’s Agape (Broomall PA: Saturnalia Books, 2026) [see my review of such here] or Ottawa writer Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. As Ó Tuama writes, to open the poem “Second Time Round”: “After the first failure, God tried again. / Okay, he said, Let there be Being / and there was Being. But No / Serpents, he added, and a world / filled with No Serpents made itself, / but God still saw them everywhere— / from the way the clouds / would round the mountains / to the ripples on the sand. / No, no, he said, undoing everything again. / Another go. New World. Only Flying Tings. / And behold! a world / with only flying things unfurled.”

Whereas Ó Tuama’s collection is set at the intersection of queer love and theology (through the positive and negative elements that accompany), he also offers pieces that lean separately into either of these subjects, and the collection is organized into five separate themed and structural cluster-sections of lyrics: “The Book of Confusions,” “There Is No Such Thing as the Past,” “Seven Deadly Sonnets,” “Love Between Men” and “Our Lady of Desire.” There is such weight in Ó Tuama’s lines, even across such a lightness of lyric. “Most didn’t know one another from the / outside world,” he writes, mid-way through “The Weight of Time,” “though one recognized / the new guy from an app.” A few pages further, to open “The End of the World,” as he begins: “The end of the world happened yesterday. / A man told a man he was in love with him, / but that man didn’t love him back. // Buildings crumbled. The avenue / cracked, then split apart, swallowing the / beach on which they sat, the trees, / the birds in the trees, the library, the sun.” Or even further, as part of “Our Lady of the Apocalypse,” that includes: “You see your dad / —as limited as he said he was—asking for / compassion for having had to make do with blunt tools.” Across the length and breath of his poems, Ó Tuama works elements of the lyric prose line and the sonnet, clipped line and breath take, narrating intimacies and rage and alternate possibilities with a clear sense of narrative lyric and a sequence of underplayed formal inventivenessess. This is a hefty, intimate collection, and Ó Tuama is clearly a fine thinker. One might wonder where a conversation like this might eventually lead, certainly, whether through poems or even non-fiction. I would be curious to see him explore further.