You Can't Love Yourself

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A rip-roaring adventure through space and time with the Queen of Drag herself, RuPaul Andre Charles! You Can’t Love Yourself is a wickedly camp collection of poems that explore the cult of celebrity and RuPaul as man, myth and monster.

Featuring 12 poems and an essay, plus an extra special guest poem by Chris Smyth.

Out now!

CALL ME ISHMAEL

‘May I call you Ishmael?’
asks RuPaul Andre Charles
emerging from the Indian Ocean
disguised as a white whale.

She is ninety foot high,

deformed of jaw,

harpoons embedded in her side,

her spirit-spout

illuminated by the moon,

punctures in her fluke.

The curl of her lip is an

infernal aforethought of ferocity;

her plucked brow, 
a nameless horror,

mystical and ineffable.

She is immortal and omnipresent,
this bold general,

this inscrutable thing,

this mask of God.

‘Why yes darling,’
says the ship’s oarsman,
caught in the swift,
sudden turn of death,
realising for the first time
the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

‘Everybody does.’

Michael Lee Richardson is a writer and screenwriter from Glasgow who likes likes 80s makeover montages, witches, and going to the shops.

Chris Smyth is an Irish screenwriter who actually prefers it when it’s RuPaul’s Best Friend Race.