This book is about valuing the sensations of loss and melancholy and the longing to transform the painful into something meaningful, the junky into something valuable. Drawing on a wide range of material from art, theater, music, and literature in order to bring something to the losses of history and culture, Contreras argues that historical memory is embedded in these forms of art and can perhaps take us "somewhere better than this place." The critical energies in the book come from Chicana/o and queer studies. Contreras views unrequited love as a utopian space of possibility and...