Raw and wild verse about yearning

Originally reviewed on Bookwyrm https://books.theunseen.city/user/4thace/review/203349#anchor-203349

I first ran across this author's work online, not knowing anything about his history with the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The Foreword by Nobelist Louise Glück talk about why she chose it and the Introduction on the twentieth anniversary of publication put the importance of this debut in context.

This is an influential collection of poems which crackle on the page, tormented by sexual desire for a man by another man while at the same time fearing what the attainment of the desire might bring. The fear is not far away, fear of acts that could lead to pain, violence, potentially death, yet expressing a love nearly too powerful to resist. The poems do not describe sex in any explicit way but there are plenty of images of bodies, of knives and bullets and guns, kisses and blows and submergence. The words talk about things about to happen suggesting there might be no avoiding them. There is one prose poem "You Are Jeff" in numbered sections written in second person which continually shifts the identity of the characters, the viewpoint, a motorbike race around a hairpin turn considered from one moment and then another, domestic scenes and nightmare scenarios and metaphysical presences. It is a lot to take in all at once.