Patrick Kindig' s Alma Award-winning second poetry collection, Agape, is a frank meditation on queer love and desire. A kind of erotic Bildungsroman in verse, it charts the development of a single gay speaker from messy, promiscuous boy into married man. It also locates this narrative within a longer history of queer desire, one that ties lust to violence and pleasure to pain. Interlacing erotic poems, poems that explore gay domestic life, and poems that reimagine key figures from Western myth in (homo)erotic terms, the collection as a whole constitutes a timely exploration of what it means for a gay man to love and be loved.
