by Michael Harper
July 7, 2026
Party Line by Kyle Carrero Lopez; Graywolf Press; 88 pages; $17.00.
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s debut full-length poetry collection, Party Line, stretches the definition of what a party is and can be. Family, politics, dance clubs, publishing circles, the Cuban diaspora, social classes, and queerness all become parties within the pages of this book, with strictly enforced rules about what belongs and what does not. By focusing on the concept of parties, Lopez simultaneously celebrates and critiques a variety of spaces to comment on who or what to belongs to each definition.
Party Line opens with a series of poems that explore different iterations of traditional parties. Here, the reader encounters the strange, surreal, poignant and funny, interspliced with observations about politics, race, and class, as the poems jump from Fire Island to dance floors, from dark room parties to a Caribbean Maypole celebration. While this combination of party settings and social commentary might seem jarring, Lopez’s choice to focus on a variety of people pinballing against each other creates a stream of underground currents flowing from the group dynamics that are unique to each place. As each poem gets stacked, the reader sees patterns of coded power emerge through the speaker’s evolving interactions. In this way, the book turns the concept of a “party” on its head, again and again, to examine it in a new light.
Through investigation of what it means to belong, Lopez develops a tension between breezy up-beat lyricism and the somber reality lurking in the corners of all spaces:
When our bottle service comes, we pour shots,
pull others to join us, connect with people!
Shake and shimmy and keep the energy
up and up. All fun, all silly,
all of it with operating costs in mind.
The pleasure of these spaces can’t escape the expectations and rules that slowly reveal themselves. But ironically, these are also the spaces that offer a possibility of release. The swirling dancing bodies and songs that make people scream into the void of a dark dance club are each moments when notions of performance become lost in the sweaty mess of sticky skin and percussive throbbing beats:
Her face betrays both strain and thrill
as she yanks at her hair,
her clothes, her cords, her batch of tools laid bare.
………………………………
How would it feel, were it seamless the way she
makes it seem? To feel so fully in one’s body; to be?
Yet, Lopez never allows this contradiction to go unnoticed for long or for any spaces to be represented as apolitical. In an interview with V Magazine, Lopez states, “I’m also pretty critical of talking about the dance floor as a church, a holy place, or whatever. The church asks a lot of conformity as well, and if you’re not able to fold yourself into the expectations of the church, you often are not truly welcome.” Likewise, the reader never slips too far into pleasure without being reminded of the cost of entry into these parties. Lopez consistently draws his readers’ attention to people who don’t feel part of the space they should belong to, or who are flattened into blending into the group.
In this way, Lopez also illuminates the dangers of being accepted into these places and erased. He reminds us that there is always a tax to pay. This balance between the simultaneous privilege and danger of acceptance is represented in the opening poem, “The Rules,” where the speaker reflects on the power party hosts (be those governments or just people able to make a guest list) can wield and the delicate balance of access that can be taken away from someone at a moment’s notice:
I been Mister Jester from the jump,
stay tellin’ tall tales. Stay worried
what could come if I stop being fun.
As the book lengthens, the tension grows and the definition of parties expands, pulling in more and more insider/outsider dynamics, specifically surrounding Cuban-American relations and queerness in the narrator’s own family. In poems like “Embargo,” “Surgeon Without Antiseptic” and “A Few Miles From Prison,” the ratio of pleasure and danger flip, and the poems speak more directly about the effects of the US embargo on Cuba. Likewise, poems like “From an Agnostic” and “Rescuing my Grandfather, 1967” explore embargos within Lopez’s own family, examining what parts of self are allowed to exist in that established structure. Throughout these poems, the idea of how people and countries wield power is not the subtext but is brought to the forefront of the writing. But the searching for release, though different, still exists in the margins of these structures as individuals search for acceptance.
The last poems in this collection, without being moralistic or didactic, give a brief glimpse into a possible release the search for which is humming beneath the surface of the entire collection. They are not as buzzy or busy as other poems in the collection, something Lopez acknowledges in “Chalkboard” when he writes, “A certain type of reader might already have moved on/ to one of/ my more leftist gay boy internationalist intellectual or whatever poems.” They do not exactly provide answers either.
What they do is notice moments or places or people where the borders of inclusion are absent. Where the structures and the people policing them have abandoned their posts and with that, the very borders we build our lives and identities around simply disappear.
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Mind the Dress Code: Insiders, Outsiders, and the Price of Admission in Kyle Carrero Lopez’s Party Line
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Maor Attias from Pexels
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
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