The Least Poems

Ultimately, we all end up losers, at least to the atheist or agnostic, but The Least by Mac Gay documents a sample of the myriad that get a head start, whether as the unfortunate, the infamous, or the exhausted, for as Victor Hugo mentions concerning his voluminous tome Les Miserables, “there is a point… at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated into a single word.” And that word, his book’s title, translates for this book’s purposes into The Least. Gay’s narratives and dramatic monologues describe individually and in detail the misfits and the misbegotten, the tired, the unlucky, and the antiheroic, in all their pain, misery, and frustration. Perhaps we are all frail, comic facsimiles of Jesus, stumbling along in the dark, falling into our various foibles, pitfalls, and vices, longing for redemption. Whether readers can find themselves here or not is for them to discover, but the author in some strange way finds himself on nearly every page. Let the believers be reminded of Jesus’s declaration from the book of Mark: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.”