Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt

By Brontez Purnell

Published February 2024

9781739220761 | Paperback | £10.99

From the cult-favourite author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse.

In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”

The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.

With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

Brontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was longlisted for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers and a renowned dancer, performance artist, and zine-maker. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for two decades.

"This book is brutal and brutally honest, but still perversely addictive because Brontez Purnell is a performer in the truest sense. Reading Ten Bridges I've Burnt, I felt tucked-in with him, along for the intimate ride, and paused only once to write down a part I’d been looking for my whole life." —Miranda July

"This memoir in verse makes me enormously happy. To the things I know about Brontez Purnell add astral poet (in terms of imagination and scale) and classicist (elegant concerns). Witness it here. Lines leap out of themselves like light eruptions from the funniest angel you ever saw. I could listen to this poet for hours, drive for days on a single thought: 'in my defense/I just had to signify/that poetry/is still dangerous.'" —Eileen Myles

"An assortment of poems that serve as a personal history of sexuality, at turns funny, confrontational, and achingly sad . . . [Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt] presents abundant wry commentary on accepted norms and the extent to which one may suffer in pursuit of them. The author’s prose is vivid and earthy . . . A unique, indelible memoir on being Black and gay in America.” —Kirkus