Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection, Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity.
“The truth no one wants to name,” writes bell hooks, “is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within.” These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. The book’s three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader’s diary, broken up by two interludes of “divinations” – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.
Graeme Bezanson’s debut collection, Ultra Blue, is a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys and the challenges of growing up within contemporary constructions of masculinity.
“The truth no one wants to name,” writes bell hooks, “is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within.” These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson's struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. The book’s three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader’s diary, broken up by two interludes of “divinations” – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 7, 2026 |
| Specifications | 80 pages | 5.75 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | Best Poetry; Pop Culture; Cool Poets; Poetry for Men; Manosphere; Alpha Male; Red Pill; Feminist Poetry; Poetry to Heal the Culture; Aaron Kreuter; Fatherhood; Mikko Harvey; Mathew Henderson; Adolescence; Male Poet; Poems About Men; Debut; Scott Galloway; |
| Written By |
GRAEME BEZANSON is a Nova Scotian writer who spent the past eleven years living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from The New School in New York City. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the US, and Europe, in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems. |
| Written By |
|
GRAEME BEZANSON is a Nova Scotian writer who spent the past eleven years living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from The New School in New York City. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the US, and Europe, in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems. |
“Graeme Bezanson’s lyric energy pulses the truth of uncertainty, with a care for words—revelators of desire’s chthonic energies.” —Dale Smith, author of The Size of Paradise
”“Brilliant and necessary … This is required reading for a better future.” —CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
”“Bezanson traverses a tumultuous inner landscape with extraordinary clarity, distilling the tensions of boyhood, fatherhood, friendship, and other social relations into a constellation of resonant images.” —Jay Ritchie, author of Listening in Many Publics
”