When they met, David was a 41-year-old heroin addict, homeless and dying of AIDS. The author was a 27-year-old, self-absorbed, bar-hopping poet--and his caseworker. In 1989, in New York City, there was nothing "manageable" about AIDS, and David would have only eight more months to live, but they were drawn into a sweet, desperate, forbidden relationship in which the boundary between "client" and "caseworker" dissolved. Living together in secrecy in his little Lower East Side studio for those final eight months, they hoped for the impossible until it was impossible to hope any more. Sixteen...

"How the night parades. How wretched all the milky stars a million years erupting, the dry cicadas, silent, sliding among leaves, this glass I said I wouldn't have. Here's to a rough deliverance, the fire in the chest."

A collection of poems from the author of Holding Breath: A Memoir of AIDS' Wildfire Days, A Rough Deliverance begins with poems the author wrote as an ambitious and conflicted 22-year old college student just learning to navigate her life on her own, a young woman who wanted nothing more than to be a "famous poet," and attended NYU's graduate poetry program in order to try...

"Nancy Bevilaqua's poems beautifully incorporate the language of apocryphal and Gnostic texts, as well as Roman mythology, giving us pollinated lines full of an understanding of what it means to love supernaturally and to feel limited by our physicality. The characters of the New Testament are blooming, are transformed, are given true voices that are calling out past the limitations of the body. The images in these poems juxtapose the sand under our feet with stardust, uniting the sad truths of death, time, and money with elusive, honey-dripping truths that hint at a larger world." --David...