Love the Stranger

This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande's troubling and gorgeous _Love the Stranger_-- "watch yourself grow muscle in your failures / and hate it"-- could be the founding document. -- Josh Bell, author of _No Planets Strike_