Edgemere

Steven Riels Edgemere is gorgeous heartbreaking and witty - often at the same time. With exquisite precision and extraordinary musicality Riel traces the shimmering fragile webs of love experience and culture that connect us to one another. From the inner life of bullied sissy boys to the ravages of AIDS to inimitable pop culture reveries such as In Search of Della Street Riels language creates a poetic space in which the individual sometimes idiosyncratic perspectives he explore open into vistas on what it means to be human. ---Joy Ladin author of The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something Shapeshifting abounds in Steven Riels latest collection as this pro-feminist gay poet marshals a parade of female personas that includes Senator Elizabeth Dole Joan of Arc and The Supremes. Riels poems zigzag across liminal spaces not just between male/female and human/inhuman but between those fallen from AIDS and survivors who grieve them.