Madness

"Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—The New York TimesFINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of AmericaSet in a speculative present, Madness alternates between poetry and editorial commentary to investigate how language spans a life. Madness is a selected poems for a fictional poet: Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a minor name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. This is a story of the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.