While watching a go-go dancer in an empty bar, the speaker confesses: “I still, somehow, believe in the soul, / which transcends the body & triumphs / over death, which lingers over everything…”īelief persists, even in the face of interrogation through suffering, illness, and death. The poems in this collection shift position and bend the light, wrestling with what to believe of the rainbow promises of “never again.” The God of these poems “watches over us from space like a meteor in orbit / Or the large sad eye of Jupiter.” Yet like a persistent ghost, the former faith of the speaker keeps coming back. Faith and doubt of the Christian persuasion are another constant thread through the book’s examination of self and contemporary U.S. This brush with Biblical language and the nature of belief is not a chance encounter. The poem closes with a double negative: they (and we) have no reason not to believe this Pauline pronouncement. All we’re told by the party’s host-turned-preacher is that in this moment “…The old world / has passed away- / Behold! All things have been / made new.” In the poem “Near the End of the Century,” we read: “…Time is elastic: / either it’s 1994, or it’s 1980 / or it was just last night, / it makes no difference…” As we follow the “someone” of this poem as they walk away from “everything they know” towards a world of bass drums, mascara, runways, and disco balls, there’s no way to know if AIDS is in their past, present, future, or somehow all three at once. Time shifts and stretches and bends whether walking through a park with the beloved, cruising down bathhouse hallways, club hopping in the Castro district, or making love in a car. In the world of Rancourt’s poems, places hold memory and the past persists, whether acknowledged or not. “The guidebook says we might be haunted / if the mist and the light / are just right…” the closing poem says, still undecided whether the fear and grief of a generation is more of a looming haunted shadow or a rainbow mirage. Through the eyes of these post-AIDS-epidemic poems, we thoughtfully look at the ways the virus is both a thing of the past and very much present. Much like the phenomenon after which the collection is titled, the search for answers is part ghost hunt and part investigation of an illusion. What does it mean to love when one’s love has intimate ties to the spectre of death? This is one of the central questions that haunts Jacques J.
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