Poetry. LGBT Studies. "The poems of Kevin McLellan's highly accomplished first collection are haunting and elliptical but never oblique or encoded. Lightning flashes of insight, memory, elegy, and stern self-reckonings illuminate the horizons of these poems, which are unsettling and ecstatic by turns. These are the poems of 'polysemy without mask' that Paul Celan strove to write, and Kevin McLellan is a poet of singular promise."—David Wojahn