Hand Me the Limits

A new collection from Lambda Literary Award finalist Ted Rees, combining poetry and essay in a defining groundbreaking new genre.

HAND ME THE LIMITS attacks the taboo subject of illness and healthcare in our American dystopia with the grit, style, and panache that only Ted Rees could muster. Through a hybrid mix of memoir, experimental lyric, and essay, this Lambda Literary Award finalist tells us the story of losing a part of himself to cancer--and plumbs the deep, existential conflicts and emotions that such a loss presents to a queer dissident. Rees has long been a sly prophet of doom, insisting that this infected world must change or perish. He carries the torch of David Wojnarowicz, damning the forces of hegemonic oppression which ambiently percolate through culture, ready to pierce us and strike us down at any moment. HAND ME THE LIMITS asks: what happens when you witness a loved one succumbing to disease? What happens when you, too, succumb to disease? You find yourself on the other side of reality, in a domain ignored and scorned by polite society, suffering loss of dignity on top of potential loss of life, limb, and hole.

Rees rejects traditional cancer narratives, approaching themes of sickness and healing through the lens of his youth as a wayward, slutty crust punk with anarchic values and a killer taste in music. Through the poet's rigorous and confrontational mash-up of verse and prose, intersections of bodily affliction, gay desire, and complications of family are poked, prodded, scoped, and injected with new meaning. In a culmination of his previous works and in the face of illness and mortality, Rees continues to call upon (and interrogate) his New Narrative and punk rock forebears to amplify his screams, not of pain but of dissension and love.

"More cry of defiance than poetry collection, more 'piece of paper with a hole in it' than cancer memoir, HAND ME THE LIMITS tests the capacity of genre to stage profound loss in unbearable conditions. Ted Rees writes into forms that poets love--punk, New Narrative, slutty lyric, epistolary appeal--without surrendering to them. He emerges on the other side with all the disconcerting resilience of a Courtney Love, and an even more willful commitment to cheeky endurance against prevailing sense and overwhelming force. Ted, I also 'love this lament /you in it too, ' where even lament is counterintuitively a form of strength."--Kay Gabriel

"HAND ME THE LIMITS lends tireless wit and resistance to this sick world, illuminating poetics bent to fey rhythm and wisdom, shimmering with an invigorating hum that will never get old or die. Astute about having a body, this book seeps with integrity. A lush and sweet and wild care enacts itself in Rees' poetry, a generous work that dares to be whole and loving."--Cecily Nicholson

"Ted Rees has somehow mastered a 'writing from the other end.' In this memoir of a queer punk past and lament for a body part that can no longer stand as trip or trope, it's not the heart (even when love's at stake) but the anus that's mourned. 'We begin and end in holes, ' he quips. Without succumbing to the 'redemptive arcs of cancer survival narratives, ' Rees instead waves the flag of 'multifarious orgasm'-- a term that captures not only the crescendos of his own engagement with bodies, histories, and memories but also the reader's pleasure as meaning shoots off in all directions."--Jean Day

Poetry. Essay. LGBTQ+ Studies.