This fearless debut transcends the obscene with its self-conscious probing of sexual identity. Navigating each line with a tender awareness and a luminous honesty, Angelo Nikolopoulos exposes the complex worlds of forbidden desire and vulnerability. His lyric poems boldly defy social norms with their uninhibited passion for revealing the tangled intricacies of beauty and shame.From "Take the Body Out":But I love the body.Even before the arm and leg buds appearedin the fifth week after they made meinside the mouth’s outline my tongue’s rough draftwhere I’d first learn pleasure and needthrough the lips in sequence—liquids before solids, milk before steel-tipand split pea soup, cotton-edged quiltto stubbled frame of mouth.I love the bodybookended by introduction and conclusionwhere we learned in high schoolto imbed our details:in his beech-blond desk bored with Pythagorashe’d lean forwardand I’d love the body that wasn’t mineAngelo Nikolopoulos was raised in California and is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of the 2011 Discovery/Boston Review prize for poetry and has taught creative writing at several institutions, including New York University and Rutgers University. He lives in New York City.