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Book Cover for: Obscenely Yours, Angelo Nikolopoulos

Obscenely Yours

Angelo Nikolopoulos

Finalist:Lambda Literary Award -Gay Poetry (2014)

This fearless debut transcends the obscene with its self-conscious probing of sexual identity. Navigating each line with a tender awareness and a luminous honesty, Angelo Nikolopoulos exposes the complex worlds of forbidden desire and vulnerability. His lyric poems boldly defy social norms with their uninhibited passion for revealing the tangled intricacies of beauty and shame.

From "Take the Body Out"

But I love the body.
Even before the arm and leg buds appeared

in the fifth week after they made me
inside the mouth's outline

my tongue's rough draft
where I'd first learn pleasure and need

through the lips in sequence--
liquids before solids, milk before steel-tip

and split pea soup, cotton-edged quilt
to stubbled frame of mouth.

I love the body
bookended by introduction and conclusion

where we learned in high school
to imbed our details:

in his beech-blond desk bored with Pythagoras
he'd lean forward

and I'd love the body that wasn't mine

Angelo Nikolopoulos was raised in California and is a graduate of New York University's creative writing program. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of the 2011 Discovery/Boston Review prize for poetry and has taught creative writing at several institutions, including New York University and Rutgers University. He lives in New York City.


Book Details

  • Publisher: Alice James Books
  • Publish Date: Apr 16th, 2013
  • Pages: 96
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9781882295999
  • Categories: American - GeneralLGBTQ+Subjects & Themes - General

About the Author

Nikolopoulos, Angelo: - Angelo Nikolopoulos was raised in California and is a graduate of New York University's creative writing program. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, North American Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He was the recipient of the 2011 Discovery/Boston Review prize for poetry and has taught creative writing at several institutions, including New York University and Rutgers University. He lives in New York City.

Praise for this book

"Nikolopoulos's debut is careful, sexy. . . . The body, its ecstasy and its shame, is this poet's obsession, and he observes it with a straightforward awe." --Publishers Weekly

"'Take the body out, ' this poet is told, 'as in erase it.' But Angelo Nikolopoulos is smart and rebellious enough to bring the body out instead--out of its inarticulate silence, out of its closet. These poems plunge straightforwardly into the heart of sex: the spirit and hope, terror and boredom, the elation and shame and beauty of the thing itself. A divine spirit that indwells in nature and the universe? 'Where else would it be?' Nikolopoulos asks. Obscenely Yours is a thrilling book: crackingly alive, brilliant and absolutely fearless." --Mark Doty

"Dynamic and dead-on, these poems speak to the urge, the threat, the violent appetite of desire. They also do the hard work of unraveling the question of love--the thing we 'take on faith...lightly, ' that asks everything and promises only we 'are not dead.' Obscenely Yours leads us through the Cineplex of ecstatic language and out into the wilderness of human longing, where we let go the selves we know and become 'something else entirely.'" --Tracy K. Smith

"These supple poems are at once frank and mysterious, and they explore desire in a way that feels modern and intelligent. An audacious debut, Obscenely Yours is devilishly candid and definitely scandalous." --Edmund White

"I love Angelo Nikolopoulos's poems--for their embodied electricity, their sophisticated minimalism, their racy scenarios, their tender-hearted reserve. Obscenely Yours has concentrated allure, achieved through sculpted angles, ideal lighting, and a perfectly choreographed compromise between silence and speech. His lines, loaded with edge and drip and torsion, behave like an action painting tucked into the svelte envelope of a Dickinson-tight line. Inebriate of air is Angelo, whose first book is a wonder." --Wayne Koestenbaum