Bruce Parkinson Spang’s Twist Is a Reckoning with a Life Once Forced into Silence
CHARLOTTE, NC — With Twist, his eighth poetry collection, Bruce Parkinson Spang arrives at the most personal book of his career. Published in 2025 by Warren Publishing, the collection reflects on growing up gay in the Midwest during the 1950s and early 1960s, surviving the silence and expectations of an era that offered little language for identity, and finding love and authenticity later in life.
The title carries the weight of the book’s central idea. Spang draws on both the dance craze of the early 1960s and something more personal: the twist as a turning point, a moment when life bends in a new direction. The collection moves through childhood, adolescence, middle age, and late-discovered love, framed by an epigraph from Wallace Stevens that introduces the idea of “rigid emptiness,” an image that lingers in the early poems before gradually giving way to something warmer and more hopeful.
The opening section returns to boyhood. His poems are suffused with humor and a quiet wisdom. A Halloween mask encouraged by his father. A first kiss shared with another boy at a picnic table. The quiet authority of a father who ruled the household by routine and expectation. Spang writes with the precision of physical memory: the smell of Old Spice and whiskey, the creak of a floorboard, the rubber of a mask pressed against a child’s sweating face. These poems introduce the book’s central tension: a boy who knows himself internally while the world around him insists on a different story.
The second section widens into the cultural landscape of mid-century America. Pat Boone is playing in a wood-paneled basement. A teenage boy mourns the news of Marilyn Monroe’s death. A DDT truck rolling slowly through an Indiana lake town, leaving behind a chemical silence where birds once sang. Spang captures the textures and contradictions of the period and uses them to illuminate the double life many gay men of his generation were forced to live.
The themes in Twist also arrive at a moment when many older LGBTQ Americans are beginning to tell stories that were once forced into silence. For a generation that came of age before open conversation about sexuality was possible, these reflections are not simply memoir but historical testimony. Spang’s poems capture a period when identity often had to remain hidden, and they speak to the complicated process of reclaiming a life decades later.
One of the collection’s most powerful poems, “Remember, Michael,” addresses a childhood friend who came out later in life, endured mockery at a class reunion, and died by suicide soon after. The poem serves as both elegy and reckoning. In it, Spang speaks directly to the friend he could not protect, giving voice to the recognition and compassion that were never spoken aloud at the time.
The final section opens into light. Here Spang writes about his husband, Myles Rightmire, about the tentative first date after coming out at forty-eight, and about the quiet discovery that life can begin again. The poems do not erase the struggles that came before them, but they do suggest that arrival remains possible.
The collection is illustrated with original paintings by Liz Kalloch, whose work appears throughout the book. Her images offer visual counterparts to the emotional journey the poems trace, giving the volume the feel of an art book as well as a poetry collection.
Praise for Twist has come from respected voices in contemporary poetry. Ellen Bass describes the work as “full of a longing to be loved and to live authentically,” while Baron Wormser finds in the poems “a feeling of pity for our misconceptions and awe for the physical world.”
For readers who have waited for poetry that speaks honestly about the cost of living in the wrong era, Twist offers something rare: a reckoning with the past and a celebration of the life that can still be lived beyond it.
About the Author
Bruce Parkinson Spang is the author of eight poetry collections, three novels, and a memoir. His work often explores the tensions between humor and introspection, bringing together emotional depth, wit, and a reflective perspective on contemporary life. His latest book, Twist, is published by Warren Publishing.
Spang lives with his husband, Myles Rightmire.
For more information, visit www.brucepspang.com or contact the author at bspang4@gmail.com.
