Sergius Mencari Bacchus

Titled after two, fourth-century Christian martyrs whom the gay community has adopted as icons, and comprised of thirty-three poems (the number of poems corresponding to the age at which Christ was crucified), Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s collection draws upon various aspects of his own life—his sexual orientation, his ethnic Bataknese background, his Christian upbringing and grappling with the beliefs thereof, his familial history, history at large—to furnish readers with a new kind of gospel, a bittersweet and tragicomic good news, pieced together from encounters with ridicule, violence, and also, happiness.