A book that begins with love songs and ends with elegies. Tracking the arrival of the AIDS epidemic, each poem is a shade darker than its predecessor, as the mysterious plague makes itself known in horrible and irreversible ways. Few poets can write both comedy and tragedy like Gunn, let alone place them side by side in a slim volume and make them sing to each other.
— Jack K.
Description
The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive. It is also one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic poses. The nobility and sobriety of Thom Gunn's forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art.
About the Author
Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was born in England but lived in San Francisco for most of his life. He was the author of two volumes of essays in addition to his volumes of poetry.
Thom's poetry books include Boss Cupid and The Man with Night Sweats.
August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.
Praise For…
"Perhaps his most wary, moving, personal book to date. It is a forceful reminder that Gunn . . . is one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century . . . He writes of and from the modern climate, as if wholly at home here; these new poems have a claim to be some of the most authentic occasional poems of our time. - Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement
