James W Gaynor

I'll Miss You Later James W Gaynor

While personal papers during the COVID lockdown, poet James W. Gaynor came across a pocket notebook he had written in from 1986 to 1997. He had used it to organize 38 memorial services as he lost friends and loved ones to the AIDS pandemic. The information contained included contact information for relatives, newspapers, venues, florists, ministers, rabbis, a rebel Jesuit, and a Wiccan priestess - as well as scribbled notes about possible poems. Rereading the notebook - 23 years after its last entry - inspired Gaynor to go back, find the poems and put them the chronological order they suggested themselves. The result is I'll Miss You Later - a poetry memoir in 20 parts about loss and survival, forged in one epidemic, emerging in a second. It's a record of perseverance and a tribute to the humor that get us through the worst life can throw at us.