Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse - Paperback

by Brontez Purnell (Author)

One of Electric Literature's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024. One of them.'s Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024. A finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction.

"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, author of All Fours

From the beloved 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."

Author Biography

Brontez Purnell is the author of several books, most recently 100 Boyfriends, which won the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and was named an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction and the 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 performance artist and zine-maker. Born in Triana, Alabama, he lives in Oakland, California.