The poems comprising Tantalus in Los Angeles came to me in an email I sent to myself 30 years ago, containing 317 poems I wrote between 1988-1992. I found it by accident in 2025, looking for something about my car insurance. It’s been almost 40 years since I’d seen these poems. Chronologically, it represents one of my earliest works, created around the same time as The Psalms (Big 23 Press)

Tantalus in Los Angeles is a time capsule from my years bar-hopping and carousing in Hollywood, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. I have changed some of the dated references in the writing to current ones. Remember, these poems were written before the internet, before cellphones, and cat memes, when everything was IRL. Some poems I remember word for word and other seem like they were written by someone else. I have done very little editing, as these poems felt finished and spoke for themselves. I liked too their retellings of Greek mythology as urban myths.

I also wanted to share this collection to reveal what it was like coming of age when sex = death, when HIV was very much hanging around on every queer street corner and wanted to come home with you. There was no PrEP, no cure, only “safer” sex. And I wanted to document the suffering caused by various addictions which were along for the ride, as well.

-Andrew Demčák,

Rancho Palos Verdes, CA June 2026