A History of My Tattoo: A Poem

A History of My Tattoo is a book-length poem in ten parts that investigates the two major American tragedies of the late twentieth century--the defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam and the plague of HIV/AIDS—as witnessed by the volume’s narrator. Its surrealistic terrain includes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, is peopled by drag queens, soldiers, the homeless, and the narrator who has just been released from a psychiatric ward in an undisclosed city, and is haunted by the bells of a cathedral ringing in not just the new year but the new—the twenty-first—century.

From the rock-n-rollin’ 60s and disco 70s into the closing moments of the twentieth century, A History of My Tattoo unflinchingly traces one man’s experiences with the two greatest tragedies of recent U.S. history: the defeat of U.S. forces in Vietnam and the plague of HIV/AIDS.