The Unbuttoned Eye

As events unfold through the first decades of the AIDS pandemic, a public health crisis that transformed a generation, the speaker in The Unbuttoned Eye insists on the survival of the erotic in the face of life-threatening disease. In sex clubs, men eat whipped cream off bodies wrapped in cellophane. In a neighbor's home, a young man dies on a sofa as toxic medication from a drip line strips color out of fabric. These poems dive deeply into an emotional world of contradiction, as the speaker follows desire and detaches from intimacy in order to survive. Photographs of the poet as an artist's model whisper in dialogue with the reader and with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe as poems ask-Who are your dead? What is the texture of possession? This collection is an unflinching journey into the evolution of identity. Each poem challenges our definitions of compassion, trauma and love.