The Eros Conspiracy

Poetry by Greg Hewett April 1, 2006 • 6 x 9 • 124 pages • 978-1-56689-185-1 Romantic poets, revolutionaries, and gay icons lend their voices to these communiqués from lover to beloved. Beauty meets History and Love clashes with Revolution in this original, intimate, and intrigue-fueled treatise on politics, passion, and possession. A carnivalesque eroticism pervades as starry-eyed clichés are turns on their heads, shattering their subjectivity and revealing the truth beneath the platitudes in these transhistorical communiqués from lover to beloved. About the Author Greg Hewett is the author of darkacre (Coffee House Press, 2010), The Eros Conspiracy (2006), Red Suburb (2002), and To Collect the Flesh (New Rivers Press, 1996)—poetry collections that have received a Publishing Triangle Award, two Minnesota Book Award Nominations, a Lambda Book Award Nomination, and an Indie Bound Poetry Top Ten recommendation. The recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, Hewett has also been a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France, and is Professor of English at Carleton College. He is currently finishing a biography of the film noir actor Thomas Gomez. Reviews “The Eros Conspiracy is an urbane, sophisticated meditation on sexuality, politics, and history, from ancient Greece to our time, with impressive forays into the failed Soviet imperium, Mao’s China, and Rimbaud’s France. Hewett’s poetic tableau assembles Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Karl Marx, Michelangelo, Marlon Brando, Paul Klee, Dante, Zhou Enlai, Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe and a host of others, who animate his fanciful but deeply serious consideration of the idea of revolution in art and thought. Such ambition for the lyric mode is well realized here, and readers will be enchanted.” —Carolyn Forché “Greg Hewett’s epistolary romp resurrects revolutionary heroes and anti-heroes from myth, history and art and sets them against an erotic imagination to wrestle with ideals of sadness, beauty, revolution, and oblivion.” —C.D. Wright “There’s a deep pathos to this love story that winds up being profoundly political in the most personal of ways. A rare feat, and beautifully executed.” —Cole Swenson