Dead Boys Make the Best Men by Rigel Ruel Portales (chapbook)
"DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN is a daydream of masculinity, its logic and its languor. In this collection of poetry, men hold buses hostage while also fixing their son's airconditioner; boys play basketball before they die prematurely. What survives within this chapbook are their impressions, half-remembered but desperate to live a little bit longer."
Amidst loss, longing, violence, desire and dark humor in the poems of Rigel Portales lies tenderness like “[…] what light goes through.” With his language and what he does and can do with it at his age to make sense of human condition and position should make us excited about what is next after DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN that reminds us “What is instant/is local and lovable/not beloved, just bled [….]”
-Vijae O. Alquisola
Teacher, Writer
In the last lines of the title-poem of this chapbook, the persona, talking to a dead friend, apparently says, "I’m having fun, writing to you..." The overall voice in this collection sounds just like that: having fun—with jokes, anecdotes, and vignettes, among others—playful and youthful. However, the poems in this collection are never funny; instead, they reveal an ironic seriousness in tone, filled with doubt and desire. Reading Rigel Portales’s poems is akin to "hold[ing] the blade/by the blade"—you realize his poems can certainly cut deep.
-Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
Teacher, Writer
Rigel Portales’ poetry cuts incisions in the psyches of those who are lucky enough to have read and felt them. In his collection, men who kill also mourn their dead. Boys come to terms with their desire for other boys. Knives and basketballs and altar servers’ frocks. The triumph of this collection is in how it carves into rage, desperation, and grief to find where love, desire, and hope are nestled. DEAD BOYS MAKE THE BEST MEN is an exploration of the complexities of what it means to be a man in this society, a letter of tenderness to men who have been starved of it.
-Carlo Bautista
Writer