The poem “Body & Kentucky Bourbon” describes an unhealthy relationship, with Saeed Jones looking back on the relationship with new understanding. The poem reflects on the deterioration of a relationship that was broken from the start, liquor filling in the cracks of the foundation. The lines “How to name you:\/farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover” and “…do I wince at the jokes:\/white trash, farmer’s tan, good ole boy” highlights the two tones of the poem (42, 43). In the first line, the names are pleasant and affectionate, conveying a time filled with happiness and love. On the other hand, the second line has a much darker tone, insults that mirror the love in the pet names from earlier in the relationship. The theme of internalized homophobia runs through all of Jones’s poems, and “Body & Kentucky Bourbon” is no different. The line “To realize you drank\/so you could face me the morning after” illustrates the internalized homophobia in the narrator’s partner quite clearly (42). With the revelation of the narrator’s partner’s homophobia, the unhealthy relationship becomes clear, as seen in the shift in names. The pet names transitioned to insults, a joke in bed became broken glasses laying on a counter. As the narrator reflects on the memories left behind, traces of the relationship come to light in the bottom of the shot glass, especially similarities between the ex-couple. The narrator and his partner came from similar backgrounds filled with hate, but only the narrator was able to overcome the internalized homophobia and heal from some of the trauma in his past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The poem “Body & Kentucky Bourbon” describes an unhealthy relationship, with Saeed Jones looking back on the relationship with new understanding. The poem reflects on the deterioration of a relationship that was broken from the start, liquor filling in the cracks of the foundation. The lines “How to name you:\/farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover” and “…do … Continue reading Body & Kentucky Bourbon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}