The Idea of Him by Charles Flowers

"Charles Flowers’ long-awaited collection, The Idea of Him, evokes the implacable power of desire, from its earliest appearance in boyhood to the ache of adult experience. These wrenchingly honest, beautifully felt poems make clear nothing less than the soul hunger that lies deep in the body’s dreams." –Joan Larkin "In The Idea of Him, this first volume of superb lyric testimonies, we meet the adolescent male body awakening into a forbidden sexuality, then its adult counterpart abandoned by casual encounters, aggrieved by this constancy of loss, barely sustained by a wish to regain connection with paradise through the meager portions of love afforded by ordinary life. Yet it is poetry itself, its compassionate and yet elegiac meditations more sensitive than any lover’s touch, that fulfills this chronic wanting, the work full of awakened tenderness as though the universe of stars that Rilke once imagined had bent down and kissed the shining hair of its own miraculous newborn. This exce