Tea is a series of poems about survival. "To survive is an astonishing gift," D. A. Powell writes. "The price of that gift is memory." Visually arresting, Tea is an experimental poem-cycle with traditional formal techniques built into its "wild" surface. The first section consists of portraits of young men, friends or former lovers, who have contracted or have died of AIDS. Pushing into the margins of culture as well as of the page, Powell combines all manner of subject and tone to create a work part memory play, part episodic novel, part funny pages—even part dance. Poems sing from the mouths of actor Sal Mineo, Batman's sidekick Robin, and the little girl from The Exorcist. A fugue for a disco singer, a letter to the poet's dog, an ode to the 1980s and a confession of love to a public toilet vibrate between the comic and the tragic. Like its central metaphor, Tea is gossipy, swirling, steamy, and sober.

A direct and moving account of a young man's life in a time of plague. The richly textured poems in Lunch, companion volume to D. A. Powell's acclaimed debut collection, Tea, tell the story of a life; like a conversation stretched out over many lunch breaks. Hailed as "formally innovative, disjunctive but tender and always emotionally expressive" by Forrest Gander, its poems are both masticatibly small and immensely satisfying. The life in question is bifurcated by the diagnosis of HIV; "time splits," in these layered and evocative poems, as the poet's memories of childhood and adolescence are fractured by the knowledge of adulthood.

kids everywhere are called to supper: it's late it's dark and you're all played out. you want to go home no rule is left to this game. playmates scatter like breaking glass they return to smear the \\\\\\. and you're it—from "[you'd want to go to the reunion: see]" In Cocktails, D. A. Powell closes his contemporary Divine Comedy with poems of sharp wit and graceful eloquence born of the AIDS pandemic. These poems, both harrowing and beautiful, strive toward redemption and light within the transformative and often conflicting worlds of the cocktail lounge, the cinema, and the Gospels.