Author Description

Designation Youth considers six decades of living within highly sexualized sites. Remembering the past becomes a mosaic of imagined desire and actual reconstructions of past experiences. A simultaneous sense of remorse and celebration fills the pages with very material memories ranging from the interior of his mother's handbag (My Mother's Purse) to secret missives sent in brown paper bags (Tampax Tales). Bateman flirts with ideas of isolation, beauty, trauma, the sanctity of gossip, and the secrets that he feels compelled to divulge and disclose. Like the epigraph for his poem Boston 1989, "only parts of this are true, but all of them are real"--Back cover.