High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett
104 pages
Paperback
4 July 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7393979-5-1
Just inside the track’s concentric
circus rings, at the football field’s
head, is where I learned to wear
the gaze of other people like a queen
wears feathers.
In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lenses of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump.
Formally inventive, these poems speak in a vulnerable, rapturous voice that urges us to reimagine our possible selves, while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful and hard-won: the spirit triumphs, even when the body falls.
About the Author
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet and essayist. They are originally from New Mexico and currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow and were selected as a runner-up for The Missouri Review’s 2022 Poem of the Year award. Their work appears in Guernica, fourteen poems, The Stinging Fly, London Magazine, Adroit, and elsewhere.
Author photo by Abbie McNeice
Media
In Conversation With: Gustav Parker Hibbett | University Times | 16 April 2024
Eat the Storms season 8 episode 9 | Eat the Storms podcast | 13 April 2024
Praise for High Jump as Icarus Story
“High Jump as Icarus Story is a radiant book of flight and triumph, equally at home in myth and in our dilapidated world. Coming of age, coming into desire, forging a self in life and on the page – these are the poem’s transformations. ‘If paradigms don’t fit,’ Gustav Parker Hibbett writes, ‘it’s okay to customize them.’ Their debut collection is persuasive, original, and glorious.”
“From the opening moments of this collection, there is an inexorable sense of movement as Gustav Parker Hibbett, ‘an artist above the crossbar’, takes us beyond the sure-footed territory of athleticism and its celebrated status that smooths all paths with its singular focus, into questions about masculinity, race and sexuality that leave us briefly afloat before we come back down to earth.”
“Throughout this exhilarating debut, Hibbett explores the joy and release of athletic endeavour as well as the inevitable anxieties of inhabiting a queer, Black body in the 21st century, a body ‘made to bear the fears of other people’. With lyrics as supple and agile as the subject matter, these poems are a gift, both muscular and beguiling.”
“These are poems of real grace, poems in which the intellect and form are harmonised and made to move together. Gods and mythic figures provide the relief-work and architecture for a moving exploration of Blackness, the body, philosophy and so much more. Stylish, tender, playful and rigorous all at once, in this collection Parker Hibbett proves themselves to be one of our most compelling new voices.”
“A tender and ambitious work that touches upon the functions of gender, race, love, friendship, artistry and music. There is a glistening intelligence throughout in the leaps and risks that Hibbett takes across disciplines and bodies of knowledge.”