The people who assign the categories call this book "Gay and Lesbian". No, it's "Human". Monette himself said, ". . .I would rather have this volume filed under AIDS than under Poetry, because if these words speak to anyone they are for those who are mad with loss, to let them know they are not alone."

I remember that I was driving into the city on the Kennedy Expressway when I heard on the news that Paul Monette had died. It was a shock, even knowing that it was coming, any day. Oddly, I was on my way to a class on Plato.

Oddly, I say, because my favorite poem in this book is "The House on King's Road", with the lines:
". . .the lamp
pooling on the blue-bound Plato as we held
our ground through August let the material go
what you cannot buy or have in your name
is the ghost of a touch the glancing stroke
as a man passes through a room where his love
sits reading later much later the nodding head
of the one on the other's shoulder no title
usurps that place this is its home forever"

Monette wrote these poems after the death from complications of AIDS of his lover, Roger Horwitz, on whose grave are Plato's last words on Socrates, "the wisest and justest and best".

Monette was later to lose another lover, and then his own life, to the epidemic. Larry Kramer called these poems "gorgeous, heartbreaking screams". There are moments when they are maudlin, self-indulgent. He was entitled. They move me deeply, past mere sentimental tears. If one is not angry at this loss, at the many losses, one is not human.

More by Monette:
Afterlife
The Long Shot
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Sanctuary: A Tale of Life in the Woods