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Review

So many of us have lost someone to AIDS and now that the disease has moved away from us, we do not want to forget what is was like when we had such beautiful people among us. There were poets--Reinaldo Arenas, Paul Monette, Joe Brainard, James Merrill, Tory Dent, to name a few who wrote about AIDS while they suffered from it. As I said, we do not want their voices to die and now we have them collected in one volume that reflects their pain and their glory. They suffered great pain but they also developed a sense of spirituality and they , in the midst of their pain, could produce poems of great beauty.

Remembering them can be heartbreaking. Many of them knew each other and wrote about each other. Some of them were famous to many and others were unknown except, perhaps, to a few. They are a part of us that is no longer here but yet a part of them remains. All of these poets are gone but their writing remains. We may want more it but there is no more and we need to cherish what they have left because it is all that we have to remember them by. It is wonderful to read them again and again and to admire their courage, to listen to their words and to find new meanings. They have taught us to be who we are, "to be strong and to never forget". This is our past that leads to our future--the man and women we have loved and lost.

 -- Amos Lassen