In twelve intimate and craft-focused interviews, Christopher Hennessy probes some of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated poets, including Frank Bidart, Rafael Campo, Timothy Liu, and Carl Phillips. Each interview explores the poets’ complete work up until the book’s publication in 2005, illuminating the evolution of their work, as well as the connections between form and identity. “One may be tempted to argue that the fact that all are gay is simply a happy coincidence,” writes Hennessy in the introduction. “But to pretend that their sexuality doesn’t matter would be to squander an opportunity (one of many this book offers) to learn about how identity shapes a poet’s work, as it must.” Closing with a prescient list of emerging poets—Mark Bibbins, Randall Mann, Richard Siken, and Mark Wunderlich, among others—Outside the Lines makes the case that the lineage of gay poets is an essential one which “includes some of the most visionary, masterful writers of the past hundred years.”
