Intimacies & Other Devices

In Intimacies & Other Devices Kurt Heinzelman has created a marvelous hommage to the erotic in all its forms and manifestations a world in which as he so originally puts it tastes one true sommelier is beauty and constellations of geese can actually be seen as fellating the starstruck skies. This is a poet not ashamed of lust and its accompanying hunger for beauty at any age and who knows how to make of those hungers a world both subtle and celebrative at once. A wonderful book one that will bring pleasure in the deepest sense to all who encounter it. -Michael Blumenthal author of Hurry Up: Poems 2000-2012 It is wonderful to experience a poets bounty as we do in Kurt Heinzelmans rich new volume with its expansive variety of voices inventions and moods across a range from probing reflection to sheer rapture. Its fine to be with a poet who can find words for the deepest intimacies of love of what can pass between men and women. Its a pleasure too to participate in the playful re-interpretation of long traditions in the hands of one who knows to feel the spring of poetic rhythm and the eloquence of the intricately concentrated expression as memory desire humor and sensuality are shaped in virtuosic language. -Nicholas Jose novelist and editor of the Norton Anthology of Australian Literature Kurt Heinzelmans wonderful new collection is full-on plural replete both with intimacies and with the great range of devices poets and lovers employ. Ballads whose diction ranges from wont and my lady to giddyup and nipple rings free-ranging adaptations of Horace Neruda and Eluard The Principles of Adultery based on the indices of refraction-these poems are wildly imaginative and very very sexy. -Ellen Doré Watson author of Dogged Hearts