A Wild and Precious Life: Remembering Andrea Gibson

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

Somewhere in the early 2000s I met the poet Andrea Gibson. It’s hard to remember exactly where and when because we were everywhere, all of the time—touring, reading, writing—and we’d often cross paths. It might have been at the literary festival we headlined in Hawaii in the summer of 2009, or at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Or perhaps it was in some living room or bookstore or warehouse along the way. I think Andrea would have liked it this way—the beginning of our friendship shrouded in mystery so we could fill in the blanks with whatever our poet imaginations might think up. All I’m certain of is that Andrea was my friend for close to two decades and that they changed my life, and that of so many others.

Andrea, who was nonbinary and went by they/them pronouns, died in July from cancer at the age of 49. They had a unique gift as a poet, capable of wielding sharp language on the page and of masterfully conveying it on stage, too. In 2004, Andrea performed “Dive,” now one of their most revered early poems, at the National Slam Poetry Championship. The poem starts off in simple rhyming couplet, but soon ditches structure entirely and turns into a political power ballad about war, queer identity, and social injustice, that ricochets off Andrea’s tongue:

I’ve heard poets telling lies
that made me believe in heaven

Sometimes I imagine Hitler at seven years old
a paint brush in his hand at school
thinking what color should I paint my soul

Sometimes I remember myself
with track marks on my tongue
from shooting up convictions
that would have hung innocent men from trees
Have you ever seen a mother falling to her knees
the day her son dies in a war she voted for

Can you imagine how many gay teen-age lives were saved
the day Matthew Shepherd died
could there have been anything louder
than the noise inside his father’s head
when he begged the jury
please don’t take the lives of the men
who turned my son’s skull to powder

Andrea began their career competing and performing on some of the biggest Slam Poetry stages in America in the mid 1990s, alongside performance poet titans like Buddy Wakefield, Patricia Smith, and Sonya Renee Taylor. “When I think of writers like bell hooks and Toni Morrison, I think of beings whose words direct us back to truth when we stray into illusion,” Taylor recently told me when I reached out to ask her for some thoughts on Andrea:

I think of writers who were oracles of a sort. People whose work found us in the most opportune and desperate of times, to remind us of who and what we are. Andrea’s prolific work is a cosmic gift such that we might see ourselves and each other more clearly. Which is to see all of it as love. 

Andrea did indeed see all of it as love, and their politics extended to desire, sexuality, and even humor—whether they were writing about coming out or about having sex with a woman while menstruating. They were punk rock in every sense of the term, someone who pushed boundaries and broke stigmas by daring to say what others might be too afraid to even feel, let alone write and perform out loud.

Andrea was that rare breed of writer whose deep compassion for the human condition was limitless, potent, and unequivocal. Their poems were diverse and wide-ranging in theme, and they wrote with unvarnished honesty and integrity about American racism, and the privileges of being white, albeit queer, as in the poem “Privilege Is Never Having to Think about It,” which they wrote for Taylor while the two were on a literary tour together.

By the early aughts, Andrea was a known writer and performer, but they had yet to publish a single book, nor had they really considered doing so until the poet Derrick Brown approached them. Brown had launched the independent publishing company Write Bloody Publishing in 2004, and it became one of the biggest independent presses in the country. While Andrea was at first unsure of the idea, feeling that their material was best performed, not read, Brown soon won them over, publishing their first three collections of poetry, as well as a volume they edited, and becoming one of their strongest editors and supporters in the years that followed. I spoke to Brown about Andrea’s legacy, and what he saw in them early on: 

I loved the safety and ease of shooting the shit with Andrea, like I had known them all my life. In many ways, this was exactly what they made a reader feel on the page, too. They were someone who’s writing made you feel like you were being confided in.

In “Pole Dancer” (from Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns), another notable early poem, Andrea reflects on many of the themes that would continue to animate their work, on the page and on the stage. I loved this poem from the minute I first read it—or perhaps, heard them read it in person—how it weaves together destruction and growth, conflating rebirth with pain, and suggesting that becoming who you’re meant to be requires breaking open.

And I want to grow 
strong as the last patch of sage on a hillside
Stretching towards the lightning.
God has always been an arsonist.
Heaven has always been on fire.
She is a butterfly knife bursting from a cocoon in my belly.
Love is a half-moon hanging over Baghdad
promising to one day grow full,
to pull the tides through our desert wounds
and fill every clip of empty shells with the ocean.
Already there is salt on my lips.

Andrea’s health began to decline in their mid-forties, and in 2021 they were diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. I was shocked when I heard the news, having lost my own grandmother to this exact form of the disease. After hearing the news, I texted Andrea that I loved them—their body, their mind, their spirit—and that I was there for them in any way they might need. “Thank you,” they wrote right back, “I love you.”

The years of illness opened Andrea up to seeing the world in a new light, and their once rage-infused performances began to tenderize into something different, deeper. Their writing moved beyond protesting the injustices of the world in binary political terms of right and left as they began to explore the problem of our shared inhumanity. Andrea could see what so many could not: that we are more fractured than ever, and that the only salve might be to lean into what sometimes feels impossible—to love and appreciate each other in spite of our differences. In 2023, Andrea wrote “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room,” a moving poem about finding themselves sitting next to a person also getting chemotherapy, whose political stance and values are the exact opposite of Andrea’s.

I want to feel what I rarely feel outside of here, that everyone is rooting for me to survive—even MAGA hat guy. I want him to want me to live so long, I could walk over right now, tell him I had to have my ovaries removed, and he’d be so kind. He’d say, Andrea, you can absolutely have one of mine. Just, here. Have it.

While they couldn’t tour as regularly as they had before becoming ill, Andrea still had so much they wanted to say and write about. In 2021, they launched the popular online newsletter Things That Don’t Suck, which has grown to more than 150,000 subscribers, and is now run by Andrea’s widow and creative partner, poet Megan Falley. After the 2024 presidential election, Andrea posted a letter they had written in response to a friend, who had asked, in despair, “What do we do now?”

“My first response was to stare blankly at a blank wall for an hour,” Andrea wrote, then continued:

But I’ve had a week to sit with it, and here’s what I want to share:

Last April, after two years of chemotherapy, when my oncologist told me the cancer was now considered incurable, I felt the expected fear and grief. But something I didn’t tell you was this—I also felt relief. Why relief? Because when I heard the system say, “We can’t save you,” it was the first time since my diagnosis that I felt as if my life was in my hands. Watching the election, I felt something similar: grief, fear. Then this thought—Our lives are in our hands. They always were, but it’s clearer than ever now.

As a performance poet, Andrea caught the attention of artists and performers ranging from the comedian Tig Notaro, podcaster and author Glennon Doyle, and singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco, who took Andrea on tour with her in the fall of 2017. As DiFranco recalled:

Even before the great grounding and cracking-open effect of their cancer diagnosis, they were already there— operating from a place of love. Love, presence, gratitude and compassion are the frequencies they emanated through their words.

In August, I traveled to Denver to attend Andrea’s memorial service and the reading that followed, which brought 30 poets from across the country to Denver’s infamous queer bar and performance space, the Mercury Cafe (now called The Pearl), where we read from Andrea’s sizable body of work. We could all feel Andrea’s physical absence from the room that night, but their presence was palpable, too, through the poems being read on stage.

After I read Andrea’s poem “How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best” on stage, I made my way through the more than 300 attendees who packed the venue and found Buddy Wakefield, one of my favorite living writers, who was standing at the back of the room. A dear friend of mine, Buddy was also very close to Andrea. So close, in fact, he had been by their side through their final months, and was the subject of two stunning poems Andrea wrote for him: “Thank Goodness” and “The Year of No Grudges.” We stood together in silence and watched as a poet who was not Andrea read “The Year of No Grudges” on stage. Occasionally, Buddy would wipe tears from his eyes. Later, I wrote to ask how that moment had felt for him. “Andrea gave us a doorway through which we can walk if we want to. Joy is a choice. A simple horse,” he told me, and:

They wrote those poems about me. I am not humbled to announce it—I mean to toot my own horn. I’ve always been their puffy chested big brother on his feet. Clapping the skin off. Howling loudest. Piercing whistle. Love makes no mistakes.

Andrea’s love never did make mistakes, only choices—bold ones in the way they lived, the way they wrote poetry, and the way they died. They forced us, with the kindest hand, to reckon with our own lives and the ways in which we are living them—or not living them—to their fullest potential. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” asks Mary Oliver at the end of her poem, “The Summer Day.” The way Andrea lived, right up until the very end, was their answer. They set a generation of poets, artists, and others—across political divides—on fire, with inspiration and introspection, and we are all still burning, still learning from them how much light this living can hold.