SUYDAM PRESS

In Being Fat And Gay In Bushwick, Hank Ladella deploys the strict brevity of the contemporary American haiku not as pastoral escapism, but as a razor-sharp scalpel for late-capitalist friction and nocturnal longing. Moving methodically through the hyper-local grid bounded by Myrtle Avenue, Jefferson Street, and the nighttime perimeter of Maria Hernandez Park, these twenty-eight short texts register the physical frictions of an unapologetic fat queer body occupying walk-up landings, sweltering bodegas, laundromat benches, and uninsulated bedrooms. Ladella refrains from decorative sentimentality; each line is calibrated with mathematical detachment, tracking how desire curdles, clarifies, or persists beneath overhead halogen lights.

Far from a conventional memoir, this sequence functions as a devastating urban inventory of rapid gentrification, rent debt, and bodily displacement. Ladella weighs the absurdities of post-industrial bohemia against the unflinching reality of somatic weight, appetite, and fleeting intimacy on asphalt. The resulting collection is at once hilarious, formally ascetic, and quietly monumental—an essential dispatch from North Brooklyn’s shifting margins.