On one level,
Special Subcommittee
is an experimental family history of Samuel Solomon's communist, labor-organizer grandparents, told through the sterile language of redacted FBI files and transcripts of congressional hearings. Against these subcommittees of repression, he then invents an ardent and committed lyric of queer communist relation revolving around his chosen family: his friends, lovers, and political comrades. The combination is wild, radical, and subversive.
Samuel Solomon
is the author of
Life of Riley
and the co-translator of
The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin
. He teaches at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.