Even in those austere and outdated yet stubbornly present “man-to-man” relationships with all their parochial prepossessions and culpable self-restraint, even in the manliest, loneliest men there is a wonderstruck reverence for the opposite that betrays a break-and-not-bend fragility, a bucking eagerness for grace.

David Moolten's last book, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won last year’s Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.