Someone You Love Is Still Alive by Ephraim Scott Sommers
In Someone You Love Is Still Alive, I was repeatedly punched with poems that left me feeling broken, yet somehow, still hopeful. Battered, beaten, bruised: The violence in your book could not be ignored. But I also could not ignore the tenderness, the sexuality, the religion, the nuanced experience of masculinity and love, and what it means to be both masculine and soft. Your poems stuck with me. I thought about them for days after the first time I read them. I thought about my husband. I thought about his tenderness and his love and his masculinity in a way that I hadn’t before.