Deviants

The poems of Deviants disrupt and challenge existing categories of gender and sexuality, moving beyond received ideas of masculine and feminine, gay and straight, into a more hybridized, contingent, and unsettling view of the world. Many of the poems complicate the easy relationship between speaker and reader through the use of shifting personae whose designs on the reader are slippery and sometimes adversarial. The speakers of Deviants wear many masks - they are loners and flirts, worriers and snarlers, supplicants and Jeremiahs. But they all share an urge toward both transgression and transcendence. With craft, dark wit and an edgy honesty in every line, these poems unsettle our familiar world. There are no comfortable places left after these wonderful lyrics have done their work. The domestic, social, erotic, and historic are all turned inside out; made subject to a fierce glare. This is a book of compelling estrangements. It is also a very fine first collection. --Eavan Boland The gorgeous poems in Deviants are intimate, grimy, and chillingly elusive. I admire the way Peter Kline, an expert formalist, undermines poetic form: he understands, the way Marianne Moore understood, the way Thom Gunn understood, the freedoms in propriety and deviation. Kline, ever the artful voyeur ("I go where everyone goes / and I go unseen"), in line after remarkable line, looks after his fortunate, unsuspecting reader with a dry eye and "a winterized grin." Deviants is a striking, unsettling collection. --Randall Mann