Steven Riel’s Edgemere is gorgeous, heartbreaking, and witty - often at the same time. With exquisite precision and extraordinary musicality, Riel traces the shimmering, fragile webs of love, experience, and culture that connect us to one another. From the inner life of bullied sissy boys to the ravages of AIDS to inimitable pop culture reveries such as In Search of Della Street, Riel’s language creates a poetic space in which the individual, sometimes idiosyncratic perspectives he explore open into vistas on what it means to be human.

—Joy Ladin, author of The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something

Shapeshifting abounds in Steven Riel’s latest collection, as this pro-feminist gay poet marshals a parade of female personas that includes Senator Elizabeth Dole, Joan of Arc, and The Supremes. Riel’s poems zigzag across liminal spaces not just between male/female and human/inhuman, but between those fallen from AIDS and survivors who grieve them.