The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by T.S. Leonard are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
The moment, if you could pinpoint it, when my collection of poems started to cohere into Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, announced itself with a flamboyant boom: a Time Traveler crashed into a gay bar. I was maybe 20-poems-deep into composing what I thought was a book when this queer character arrived and threw a storm door open onto a technicolor world. There, time and tense meld and dance; form blooms and blurs. As I followed this recurring speaker, the Time Traveler, across their shifts, I found a freer, and more fun, machine with which to explore what I’d set out to explore: grief; celebration; community care; a lineage of LGBTQ+ resilience; our noisy past, our fragile future, and our dire present. The Time Traveler finds and loses friends. They try drag and dance at the disco. They fight and fall in love. In shadowing their twirling across time, I began to find a sense of diction and direction for the poems that would become this collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival.
In Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, camp—Susan Sontag’s sensibility defined as being “alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken”—functions as a poetic device. One avatar for the Time Traveler is Dorothy, as in The Wizard of Oz. That American myth, especially as retold in the 1939 film version, has sustained a particular resonance for queer people, and in particular gay men, for its tale of leaving home for the glittering city, for its themes of strength in chosen family, and for its relationship to longing and tragedy embodied in the life of its star, Judy Garland. The film’s use of technicolor as technique to literalize the divide between Kansas and Oz—the former grimly beige, the latter a vibrant fantasia—speaks to a queer burgeoning desire for escape from constraints and belief in a far-off place to which one might better belong. Throughout the collection, the rainbow, too, recurs as a kind of border, a partition between the speaker’s Midwest home and their queer urban community. But it is also a temporal marker—another impermanent beauty; the sense of hope after a storm.
For Dorothy, as for many queer people, home was never exactly or entirely a physical space: home is another horizon line, a remembered warmth or a yearning for completion. Throughout the collection’s third section, the speaker and their friends dance through pandemics, forge community from bathhouses to rented apartments, and strive for preservation. “What do you call nostalgia for a time that hasn’t yet passed?” one interlude asks. “Hope?” In the 1933 film Queen Christina, we watch Greta Garbo, a young royal who has fled her castle (and a war) in disguise as a common man, soak in the experience of being free from palatial expectations for the first time. In an otherwise unremarkable suite in the village inn, Garbo as Christina wanders around spectrally, lightly touching each cabinet corner, embracing the bedposts: "I've been memorizing this room,” she coos. “In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room."
As the Time Traveler continues to tug at threads of art and music from the late 20th Century, the tapestry begins to unravel: in the fourth section of the collection, time collapses into a space (stage) of queer inheritance. Let’s call it the Archive. In Suite: A Fraternal Order of Glitter and Ash, the four movements jump from the Trojan War to the 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco to the AIDS-devastated early-90s before arriving in a high school cafeteria in the new millennium. In each era, there is the threat of violence and there is the thrill of community. By combining these four pieces into a suite—a musical set favored by both the Baroque and the disco labels—there is a new continuity traced along cultural lines, a sense of necessary history that is largely left out of textbooks. The section closes with the collection’s second and final ekphrastic poem, “Healing the World from Little Island,” a response to poet Tim Dlugos. Like González-Torres, Dlugos contracted and fought and worked through an AIDS diagnosis—his later work marked by a haunting, poignant urgency, fists pounding at the thin veil of life. It is in this poem that the partition between the Time Traveler and the poet most potently blurs, the voice emerging as guttural cry from atop a fresh pile of rubble (not unlike the 1960 Life magazine photograph of Gloria Swanson, begowned, posing amidst the rubble of New York’s Roxy Theater, which would inspire Stephen Sondheim’s time-traveling 1971 musical, Follies). The language is a deluge, an unrelenting parade of images from Manhattan’s last century spanning at least two pandemics, Pride and terror, movements and monuments. It is the sound of the Archive splitting open, its histories spilling out and covering our present in fabulous pasts.
Where do we go after it all breaks apart? We burrow deeper into love. In the collection’s penultimate section, the Time Traveler earns a more intimate perspective on what it means to connect. “The Time Traveler Finally Falls in Love” is a love poem heavy with an awareness that everything good must end, but still reveling in goodness. In “Heirloom” the tight tercets squeeze together images of domesticity—gardens and dinners; books and friends—in a distinctly queer household. The speaker’s lover builds them a medicine cabinet door. These are the lessons of queer lineage put into practice, a redefinition of home-making as act of radical love. In that spirit of innovation, perhaps the collection’s most formally inventive piece comes in “Saturn Street Steps,” in which brackets and forward slashes are used to create three distinct layers of time on the page. It’s a simple scene: two lovers sit on a park bench, the top of San Francisco’s slightly hidden Saturn Street, taking in the panoramic view. The present moment is interrupted, first by a forward slash to denote simple past (“the spot where we sit/sat”), and next by brackets to contain a future past: the bench “looks out all across [ what used to be ] Eureka Valley.” At what is effectively the volta, it all collapses into a single second:
you take/took
my hand in your fist
and
tell/told
me how long it would
last—
the
memory of the feeling of being
so briefly, perfectly
alive: for
all time.
The Time Traveler, inevitably, finds in every moment a door. How will all this get remembered? Who will sing our songs? In the final section of the collection, these inquiries are literalized in the form of an imagined interview. “Anderson Cooper Interviews the Time Traveler” is, on its face, a playful exercise in formal disruption. The Time Traveler is questioned in the style of a magazine interview, giving the speaker a chance to riff on the preceding themes of disco and lineage. That the interviewer is Anderson Cooper, even, may be taken as a joke, but Cooper’s own public persona as a gay man conjures some of the significant shifts which have transpired in the early 21st Century. Cooper’s trajectory follows an arc of acceptability politics: he comes out publicly in the post-AIDS era of the Human Rights Campaign and the fight for gay marriage, before ultimately “starting a family” by raising his children—in a decade where conservative panic around queer visibility in schools is back on the rise. With every step forward there is progress gained, but there is loss, too. We don’t know where the next turn of this trajectory will take us, but we can imagine.
Saturn Street Steps
The spot where we
sit/sat and you hold
/held
me /let me go
looks out all across [ what used to be ]
Eureka
Valley: little diamond tips,
the pastel Victorians /sand dunes /glass
skyscrapers.
We must [ have ]
look
[ ed ] so tiny when
you take/took
my hand in your fist
and tell/told
me how long it would
last—
the memory of the feeling of being
so briefly, perfectly
alive: for all time.
and I laugh [ ed ], nervously or
because I know/knew
even now/then
how right you are/were. We kiss
[
ed ] /release
and
under us the city
comes/came
back
to
life. For a moment, it is/was called
San Francisco
but this hill was here before us
and it is/will be
here [ still ] long after
we
leave. /we are gone.
/we return.
(originally appeared in Post Road, issue 41)
T.S. Leonard [photo credit: Wayne Bund] is a poet, performer, and educator whose work has been featured in Poetry, Foglifter, and Fourteen Poems and in collaborative projects at the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Design Center. Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, is his debut collection. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
Links: Website | Instagram | Substack
Maw Shein Win’s
most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn)
which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.
Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House
(Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and
shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet
laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for
Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival
Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award
for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of
Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University
of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California.
mawsheinwin.com
