It’s the time of summer nights in July, mid-heatwave in the height of summer; there’s only one thing for it: yearning queer poetry. This month’s choice is the brilliant debut poetry collection, Limbic by Peter Scalpello.
Bought for me as a gift from Kent’s LGBTQ+ bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, I tore through this in one sunny park setting. It felt like perfect heatwave reading for the feelings that summer often elicits: desire, nostalgia, yearning, joy, despair, the memory of formative experiences, and beyond.
What’s Limbic about?
Limbic is the debut collection by Peter Scalpello, described as a ‘glittering ode to sex, intimacy, and queer discovery’, which I couldn’t put better myself. From adrenaline-induced chemsex nights to formative lads’ holidays, and the resonance of seemingly fleeting moments of intimacy that have the capacity to scar us forever, this collection explores themes of masculinity and desire through a queer lens, often drug-fuelled and dripping with an intoxicating juggle between lust and shame.
It explores the formative seeds of teenage sex, stigma, and ecstasy in voices and vignettes told both hard and soft, tender and brutal all at once. These poems immerse us in a complex balance of hedonism and loneliness of the queer perspective, where sex and desire both connect and isolate, particularly through coming-of-age curiosity and experiences and navigating the dangers of indulgence and adventure. Something about the poems always brings us back, while taking us on emotional pursuits or working through emotional knots that feel both tragic and tender.
What stands out about Limbic?
Scalpello, a Glasgow-born poet living in London where he works as a sexual health therapist, is clearly an accomplished poet, harnessing skilful control over the careful placement of words that create vivid emotions and intention as we follow, unsure where it might lead us. Testing the boundaries of form, Scalpello’s poetry isn’t afraid to experiment on the page, while creating peaks and troughs of tension and euphoria and painting vivid moments that stay with you long after reading. My favourite poems in this collection are Faces, 2K12 and Ode to Tracksuit.
The poems feel derived from lived experience, exploring the light and dark sides of queer life and intimacy. The collection feels like a both a romantic and raw, sincere and stark, dreamlike experience, with vivid imagery of clothing and boys to the feelings undulating beneath the surface, as lines flip over to tell more than one story, or ambiguously leave us in two minds about whether an experience is a joyful or sad one, or whether desire is really a sense of despair, leaving us with the name of the collection, limbic: the nerves that aim to manage our emotions, and the gaps in between those.
The verdict?
Reading Limbic, I came away with a very specific feeling that I know I only feel from queer writing that succeeds in eliciting a certain attention from me, and creates the feeling of missing something I can’t quite put my finger on. Some readers may find the form too experimental, but at least some of the poems in here will have you thinking about your first queer crush in vivid detail: how they smelt, what shorts they were wearing, as you try keeping yourself cool in the heat. They’ll take you straight back to those first blooms of burgeoning queer moments in your life.
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As one of my favourite contemporary poets says on the collection’s cover, “Buy it a drink and let it talk to you late into the night.” – Joelle Taylor.
An extract from Limbic:
From Ode To Tracksuit:
my hungered polyester thighs show you no
mercy if you can even fathom
my shape through all this rustle
Our star rating:
Peter Scalpello’s debut poetry collection, Limbic, and new novel, Mirrorstage, both published by Cipher Press, are available to buy at Bookshop.org. Check out our book category for sapphic book reviews to heat up your summer.
Nonchalant x
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Lauren is a writer and editor based in Lewisham, covering all things queer culture, books, travel, arts and lifestyle. She also writes about hospitality and foodservice, sustainability, business and tech, and was previously a features editor for New Statesman Media Group.
