Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” Makes GQ’s “Hot Guy Books” List

In important, breaking literary news, the men’s magazine GQ (in its UK edition) has declared that “‘Hot guy books’ are the hot new accessory” and has included Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book Lunch Poems near the top of its list of the “hottest, most alluring book covers to carry this year.” As the author Josiah Gogarty puts it in his tongue-in-cheek piece, Lunch Poems is a book you could “read at lunch in Pret as the office workers come and go, and look like the most tasteful executive in town.”

This is not the first time Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems has been treated as a fashionable accessory in recent years — O’Hara-watchers will remember the odd moment a few years back when Jennifer Lawrence was spotted carrying a very expensive clutch that was actually designed to look like an oversized version of O’Hara’s pocket-sized paperback.

After discussing the recent trend of beautiful celebrities toting highbrow, literary books, Gogarty notes that “carrying around classic novels doesn’t just give models an aura of intellectual chic – regular civilians are now doing it too, as a kind of brainy thirst trap. An article in Bustle last September reported on men ditching selfies with puppies to pose with female-coded books by the likes of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, in the hopes of dredging up dating app matches. There have also been recent reports of men taking books to bars to try and attract girls. With this in mind, here is an entirely serious, entirely scientific ranking of the hottest, most alluring book covers to carry this year.”

Number 2 on this “entirely serious, entirely scientific ranking” of the hottest book covers to be spotted carrying around is the “City Lights Pocket Poet” series, with a special nod given to Lunch Poems

“City Lights Pocket Poets

This series has proper historical weight: it was started in 1955 by poet, bookseller and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and its fourth release, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial in the US in 1957. They also look great, particularly the navy-and-red edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems – which you could indeed read at lunch in Pret as the office workers come and go, and look like the most tasteful executive in town.”

Somehow this all reminds me of a passage in O’Hara’s “Steps,” one of the most lovable poems in Lunch Poems:

“everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers”

O’Hara would likely have chuckled at the idea of Lunch Poems being called a “brainy thirst trap” and topping a list of the “hottest, most alluring” books for men to flaunt that they’re reading — after all, he was a poet whose half-serious take on technical matters of poetic craft was to say “that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.”