Infinity Closet. Poetry by Robert Campbell. Paperback. 72 pages. June 15th, 2021. ISBN 9781948800433.

The poems in Infinity Closet seek to articulate the kaleidoscopic nature of queer experience by invoking the queer other as monster, celebrity, hero, partner, and enemy. Characters and personae are revealed in ways that retell familiar stories and queer the expected. Classical and Hollywood monsters, country music divas, cyborgs, sea creatures, and video game tropes collide in these poems, treated with alternating humor and ache. Speakers confront and decry the toxic, heteronormative paradigm of the hero in many guises, siding with and elevating the narrative of the outsider. Through its unwillingness to simplify and reduce the human urge to be “too many things at once,” Infinity Closet reveals the experience of coming out to be not a singular event, but a continual state of becoming, one that is defined by and cannot exist without the reader's urge to assume. In this queer multiverse, the “closet” becomes a kind of never-ending crucible and catalyst. These poems leap headlong into a necessary plurality, leaning into an extended meditation on metaphor and surprise and what relationship these self-creative acts have with the structures of power and expectation that seek to define us on their own terms.