Gunn has some lovely work here--the most notable poems are those focused on love, illness, or the contradictions of body working against spirit, or vice versa. While the illness poems are focused on AIDS, they're far more universal in meaning, and the book as a whole is both challenging and accessible. Language and imagery strengthens nearly every piece, making the narrative works especially as clear as short films and more powerful than you'd expect for a single page of verse.

My main complaint about the book, and the reason I gave it a lower rating than might be expected from what's typed above, is that the varying tones in the book make it a jarring read. This may well be on purpose, but so many of the poems are serious and meditative, while others are playful and joking (though still making meaning), that it's sometimes hard to transition from one poem to the next.

The characters and meanings are clear, but when you're wrapped up in story of love and social struggles, and suddenly a poem shows up which seems nearly wholly separate, the journey of the book as a whole is difficult to follow. As such, I think that some of the poems here would have been better included elsewhere, or at least in a single section, to make the more powerful book. On some level, I can see them useful as breaking the relatively heavy nature of the book, but I'm just not sure the effort really came through as positively as it could have.

Thus, I recommend the poems in the book, though I admit some disappointment with the construction of the volume as a whole. Still, separately, these are powerful beautiful poems, worth reading. ( )