The "brilliant and challenging" ( Library Journal ) exploration of living with HIV by the winner of the 1999 James Laughlin Award. First published in 1993, this virtuosic collection defined writing about AIDS for a generation of poets. Chaotic and incantatory, it is a submersion into the railing consciousness of a young woman on the precipice of mortality, its "dazzling and valiant poems the psalms of our present moment" (Sharon Olds). It may be a disservice to say this poet writes about AIDS--a topic that can subsume the artistic endeavor--but Dent seems to thrive on difficulty. These poems are intelligent and alive, emanating not from what the author terms "the negative state of my positiveness" but from the vertiginous cavern's edge: they are not poems about a disease but weather reports from an existential state. A mostly unrhymed hexameter line allows her to move from ballade to song lyric to satire without rupturing the book's texture. Bitter, bawdy, and sad, recalling the verse of medieval outlaw poet Francois Villon, to whom the title poem is dedicated, these are, unmistakably, love poems of our time: "the way the gross anatomy of lovemaking gives way to its interiority,/ bends supple as if broken already beneath the weighty implosion." A brilliant and challenging first collection in which the writing only occasionally spins out of control. - Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Accidental Poetry Apology To The Doctor Ash At The Dark End Of The Street Beyond Belief Caught In Your Own Reaching Death As A Material Eternal Snow Jade Let Listen Many Rivers To Cross The Mind Vs. The Brain The Murder Of Beauty/the Beauty Of Murder Only Human Poem For A Poem Poems In American Sign Language Spared Square One A Two-way Mirror: 13 A Two-way Mirror: 18 A Two-way Mirror: 2 A Two-way Mirror: 25 A Two-way Mirror: 29 Variations Walking Away: 1 Walking Away: 2 Walking Away: 3 What Silence Equals Words Aren't Cheap -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Tory Dent charts her own waters. She's a poet of brilliance and shadows. -- Eileen Myles, Denver Quarterly Used Book in Good Condition