It Was Never Supposed to Be

It Was Never Supposed to Be contains multitudes: of desires, of risks, of fears, of fluids, of loves, of assignations, of histories. “I’m in a doom generation,” Ben Kline writes early in the collection as he charts the “one step forward, two shoves back” of change arched between “one plague pitted against another.” Occupying the familiarity of traditional form and the heady rush of innovative forms, Kline builds a uniquely queer structure, a house where freedom and desire, history and progress, risk and reward coexist. From the depths of the AIDS crisis to the physical distances of covid, from the risky connections of hook-ups to the enduring peace of companionship, Kline’s poems reflect on the price of progress—both personal and communal—but refuse to let go of love, joy, and pleasure along the way.

—Charles Jensen, author of Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres and Instructions between Takeoff and Landing

Ben Kline’s IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE is a beautifully poignant American bildungsroman—crucial testimony to gay life from the 1990s to today—bearing us across hope and hate and humor to a place where nothing (n)ever changes. Led by a wizened yet vulnerable veteran of our culture wars, we take the long, bloody way home from one campaign after another. Antagonists range from likely evangelicals and politicians to less familiar, yet sexy sirens: foot fetishists, truckers, outside participants, and (first) husbands. Even as we navigate a perilous route through society’s most dangerous homophobic repudiations, Kline reveals the joy in lusty rebellion. Marriage equality’s complex gift is met with paradoxical loss and Kline’s tenderest reminiscences sparkle with clever spite. These poems’ journey won’t be waylaid, however … not by movie house porn or state park assignations … not by family members’ GOP vitriol or Clinton’s shame-faced “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Delivering delightfully executed formal diversity all with an informal frankness, IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE is nothing less than an essential contemporary epic, mapping how far we’ve come across the Gen-X decades to return to a place we never really called Home.

—L.J. Sysko, author of The Daughter of Man

If queer theories of time have taught us anything, it is that linearity—with all its myths of progress and “inevitable” betterment—is deeply dangerous. It Was Never Supposed to Be is a series of confrontations with queer time and its lessons: of histories we have forgotten, of facets of queer life old and new mixing and mingling in the lived experiences of survival and loss. Kline’s poems are an urgent refusal of queer amnesia at a cultural moment when the stakes of forgetting are so high. But these verses, more than anything, are about imagining more boldly a future for queerness that does not so easily forget what haunts it.

—Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What’s Left Is Tender and Paring

Kline’s collection It Was Never Supposed To Be tells the story of a man, and a generation, who against expectations, survived, despite knowing that their love and sex is, was and always will be unsafe, whilst also recognizing how love – in its myriad forms – maintains shape over the decades of a gay man’s life. As time moves on from silence and sarcomas, as the gay world inches towards heteronormativity, Kline is aware that ultimately, we are all on (our) knees, hoping. Because somehow, the hope never stops. That curiosity of who or what is around the corner, and ultimately knowing that despite the risk, the tests, the scares, the fear that Kline and all of us gay people have known, that in this elegiac, moving and hopeful collection that all those men, all beautiful & true were, and always will be, all worth it.

—Mark Ward, author of Nightlight

Ben Kline’s newest collection of poetry, It was Never Supposed to Be is a passage of time, a semblance of what was and what could never be. Kline draws us back to before PReP, to when lust meant fear, how he remembers “watching all the uncles / cave into their bodies.” Under all of this, Kline is yearning towards a new type of tenderness, even a type he has yet to understand, the type where his fingers “curls into his (lover) as we exit a coffee shop.” This is a masterclass in forbidden lust, teaching us what our mouths have always wanted to learn.

—jason b crawford, author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz