In Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, Alex Espinoza traces the etymology, cultural origins, and contemporary history of this particular form of gay exhibitionism.

The authors of this collaboration, Heart X-rays: A Modern Epic Poem, are not new to the apparent insanity of the early 21st century.

Like all good memoirs, Rerun Era reflects on how slippery, even duplicitous, the act of remembering itself can be.

That’s what this book does best: it provides hope. Hope that we can preserve what’s left.

It was in that narrative 180-degree turn that I realized: Holy shit, I’ve read this before.

EXTRATRANSMISSION did not leave me breathless. It violently pumped me full of air and brought oxygen back to my brain — almost too much.

In Mishima’s world, an outpouring of sincerity is only good once, and the value of a moment correlates with its proximity to beauty or death.

Some books you reread because you want to get another hit of dopamine. I reread Intrusive Beauty because I wanted a second round with it, to go back for a rematch.

In all of the stories, the complexities of the female experience are laid bare, interlaced with themes of race, class, gender, and adultery.

With intelligent musicality, Chazaro takes us back and forth over the Bay Bridge, into the diverse neighborhoods where he learned his own language for poetry and art.

I realized that it had likely been over fifteen years since I’d lived in a world without Jennifer Aniston on the cover of some magazine.

Zink’s novels take care of everybody; they cosset all the players in her imagined communities.

I got the sense, at times, that I ought to be looking, rather than reading. The tapestry of language is the message.

Jung Young Moon hasn’t exactly transformed Texas into a magical place, but he has used the state as an inspiration to manipulate words in magical ways.

This collection celebrates itself and dances, fully realized, through the world around it. González’s poetic eye resides in her crown chakra, as if she, herself, is Azabache.

Thors writes the body as metamorphic and volcanic (the site of secrets threatening to erupt), yet somehow still human.

Each sentence, traveling first through Brum’s body and then across the chasm between the two languages, demands the utmost attention.

Wyoming summons a host of ideas about working-class people in hard times, about people doing bad things for good reasons, about the choices one makes when there are no good choices.

Her second job, beyond teaching them how to write, inevitably becomes reinforcing their power, listening to their stories, and offering help to report the rape or find therapy.

Sheryl St. Germain, who writes about the loss of her son from addiction, and the addiction that runs in her family, quantifies her grief: it’s fifty miles long.