We Prefer the Damned

We Prefer the Damned, the 11th book from Carlo Matos, features poems exploring bisexual relationships, erasure and denial. Matos, equally celebrated for his fiction, poetry and prose-poetry, pushes toward a new grammar for intersectional identities as the poems in We Prefer the Damned work to integrate his Portuguese-American heritage and bi+ lived experience. Through language used and punctuated in fresh ways, Matos finds the structures and syntax to embrace past and present, old self and new self. His toughness as a former MMA fighter turns to the finessed strength of rigorous self-examination with these poems. The collection embraces the true complexities of the bi+/pan/poly experience, particularly accusations of not being queer enough or, at the same time, of being too sexual and incapable of monogamy, none of which is true. These poems also trace the boundaries where such issues interact with a working-class, child-of-immigrants upbringing, in which the very words for describing bisexuality did not exist. Recent research from Gallup (February 2021) reveals that Americans identifying as LGBT make up 5.6% of the U.S. population, a substantial increase from years past. Of those, 54.6% identify as bisexual. Gallup estimates more than 3% of all U.S. adults now self-identify as bisexual.