Advocate Bookshelf: Tiny Tomes

  Closer by Christopher Stephen Soden ($14, Queer Mojo)
The emotionally rich landscape in Christopher Soden's Closer veers from the contemporary to the ancient Greeks, covering the existential to the queer condition, in a delightfully poignant manner. A brilliantly poetic trip to a sleep clinic leads the author to question the nature of touch between two men; in another, he sees the "blizzard of pitch and muck every day, everybody just shoving and biting/and beating on each other." Whether he's grappling with a childhood neighborhood sociopath, a lack of grief over his father's death, a bisexual James Dean, or the secret crossing to man-on-man bliss, Soden's poetry is amazingly moving. QueerMojo.com