Metronome
$20.00
April 28, 2026
ISBN 978-1-959708-19-3
Read Sample
James Loop
Metronome
Comprising a decade of writing, James Loop’s debut collection chronicles an ordinary life in patriarchal time, its subjugation and inventive resistance.
In conversation with classical and modern models—particularly the Latin lyric and twentieth-century queer literatures—Metronome sounds an arcade of voices whose multiplicity, deviance, and good (and bad) humor subtly subvert authority’s myths. These intricately patterned and slyly reflexive poems employ inherited forms, including pastiche, dirge, lyric, epigram, diatribe, diary, epistolary, and prayer, submitting their variations and intercessions on what’s been and what is.
James Loop’s Metronome is alive to wit, the comedy of having a body, and the erotic life of language itself. The poems move with a rare tonal agility—by turns tender, caustic, devotional, and laugh-out-loud funny—where grief and pleasure are co-conspirators. Loop’s style is both literary and unbuttoned. What feels most bracing and most queer here is the way thought itself becomes erotic, how attention, memory, and intellect gleam as forms of intimacy. This is a book that insists thinking can be a mode of loving, and that lyric seriousness can still be mischievous, worldly, and alive.
—Stacy Szymaszek
A lover’s complaint is rarely lodged with any hopes of winning recompense—in fact, its embrace of exposure almost certainly entails more suffering, which is to say more material for future complaint. Looping through this bad infinity feels so pleasurable, though, when the lover’s tongue is by turns sharp, tender, masterful, disdainful of mastery, ready to “unstring the lute” and put “this mouth to its honest use.” Metronome is as honest about its aims, needs, and limits as it is dubious of the easy utopias with their sexy shimmer parodied in “Poem in the Dominant Style” (“I am having sex with all my friends / for Democracy”). It’s Loop’s submissive style that I have happily come to love and prefer, bratty and brash in its denunciation of grandiose bullshit, comfortable and even a little smug in its conviction that poetry barely exists. Whenever I need to descend to that ephemeral level where all living desires are found, you’ll find me bitching and moaning over “makeshift meals / in an unfamiliar kitchen,” enjoying the company of “Disappointed Eunice,” “Always Pregnant Joan,” “Impossible Paul,” and James Loop.
—Violet Spurlock
Metronome, the debut collection from James Loop, gives me all the feels. Drizzled throughout is the pastoral lyric in transit with wit, caddy restraint, queered puns, and a self-love determined and made acquaintance with the likes of Baldwin, Thomas Browne, and Yukio Mishima. Are these excursions divined by the poet’s deck? The sublime daddy of embodied loins lurking in the “could it could could it it”? The confessions of the body unmasked and in pleasure? “No one, none, boils alone” writes Loop in this garden of verse called James, this hopscotch of readied buttons tendered by limericks and epistolary, which offers more than patron saints in Palermo or New York. It presents a life lived and still living.
—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Loop's poetry offers us much we find missing in contemporary culture—it is sensitive, generous and frank, with itself and with the world.
—Huw Lemmey
James Loop is a writer from Central New York and the author of several chapbooks. His work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hot Pink, Hyperallergic, Lambda Literary, and Prelude. Audio/visual iterations of poems have been exhibited at Art-o-rama (Marseille), CRAC-Occitanie, Frieze London, and the Material Art Fair (Mexico City). For Belladonna* Collaborative, he's curated readings at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Montez Press Radio, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and works as the Publicity Director for World Poetry. Metronome is his first full-length poetry collection.
Paperback
128 Pages
5.12 x 7.95 inches
ISBN 978-1-959708-19-3
April 28, 2026
Distributed by Asterism Books (US) • Public Knowledge Books (UK)
Genre: Poetry
