Hand Me the Limits

Author: Ted Rees

Publisher: Roof Books (2024)

Hand Me the Limits attacks the taboo subjects of illness and healthcare in our American dystopia with the grit, style, and panache that only Ted Rees could muster. Through a hybrid mix of memoir, experimental lyric, and essay, this Lambda Literary Award finalist tells us the story of losing a part of himself to cancer—and plumbs the deep, existential conflicts and emotions that such a loss presents to a queer dissident. Rees has long been a sly prophet of doom, insisting that this infected world must change or perish. He carries the torch of David Wojnarowicz, damning the forces of hegemonic oppression which ambiently percolate through culture, ready to pierce us and strike us down at any moment. Hand Me the Limits asks: what happens when you witness a loved one succumbing to disease? What happens when you, too, succumb to disease? You find yourself on the other side of reality in a domain ignored and scorned by polite society, suffering loss of dignity on top of potential loss of life, limb, and hole.

Rees rejects traditional cancer narratives, approaching themes of sickness and healing through the lens of his youth as a wayward, salacious crust punk with anarchic values and a killer taste in music. Through the poet’s rigorous and confrontational mash-up of verse and prose, intersections of bodily affliction, gay desire, and complications of family are poked, prodded, scoped, and injected with new meaning. In a culmination of his previous works and in the face of illness and mortality, Rees continues to call upon (and interrogate) his New Narrative and punk rock forebears to amplify his screams, not of pain but of dissension and love.