Intimacies & Other Devices

"In Intimacies & Other Devices Kurt Heinzelman has created a marvelous hommage to the erotic in all its forms and manifestations, a world in which, as he so originally puts it, taste's 'one true sommelier' is beauty and 'constellations of geese' can actually be seen as 'fellating the starstruck skies.' This is a poet not ashamed of lust, and its accompanying hunger for beauty, at any age, and who knows how to make of those hungers a world both subtle and celebrative at once. A wonderful book, one that will bring pleasure, in the deepest sense, to all who encounter it." -Michael Blumenthal, author of Hurry Up: Poems 2000-2012 "It is wonderful to experience a poet's bounty, as we do in Kurt Heinzelman's rich new volume, with its expansive variety of voices, inventions and moods, across a range from probing reflection to sheer rapture. It's fine to be with a poet who can find words for the deepest intimacies of love, of what can pass between men and women. It's a pleasure, too, to participate in the playful re-interpretation of long traditions in the hands of one who knows, to feel the spring of poetic rhythm and the eloquence of the intricately concentrated expression, as memory, desire, humor and sensuality are shaped in virtuosic language." -Nicholas Jose, novelist and editor of the Norton Anthology of Australian Literature "Kurt Heinzelman's wonderful new collection is full-on plural, replete both with intimacies and with the great range of devices poets and lovers employ. Ballads whose diction ranges from 'wont' and 'my lady' to 'giddyup' and 'nipple rings, ' free-ranging adaptations of Horace, Neruda, and Eluard, 'The Principles of Adultery' based on the indices of refraction-these poems are wildly imaginative and very, very sexy." -Ellen Doré Watson, author of Dogged Hearts