Love-In-Idleness - Softcover

Christopher Hennessy is the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press). He earned an MFA from Emerson College, and currently is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was included in the Ploughshares' special "Emerging Writers" edition, and his poetry, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Verse, Cimarron Review, The Writer's Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Court Green, OCHO, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Wisconsin Review, Brooklyn Review, Memorious, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies of gay poets, persona poetry, and poets of social justice. Hennessy is a longtime associate editor for The Gay and Lesbian Review- Worldwide.

If I were to reduce this book to a single letter, it would be O. Opulence, obsession, orgasm and opera all start with an open throat, a gape, a release of pent-up desire. So, too, does Christopher Hennessy's Love-in-Idleness emanate from the opening of the throat to the shudder and release of the last and final word. Oh, I thought, reading these urgent, physical, dangerously beautiful poems, with 'the terror ripping open my mouth at the corners'. Yes, and Oh, yes and O... --D. A. Powell

Christopher Hennessy's poems yearn for a sense of certainty, feel their way for a foothold that, ultimately, may not be there. From childhood poems of family and farm (as unsettling, in their vivid realism, as Roethke's greenhouse poems) to persona poems of deep erotic longing, Hennessy maintains an artful and risky determination, in each poem, to understand the need its song speaks. --David Trinidad

Christopher Hennessy gets the rhythm right, the timbre right, and the heart-sense right. Every detail is in place, and the whole ensemble sings. There's hard labor behind these poems in Oscar Wilde's sense, and in Emily Dickinson's. (Did Emily talk about hard labor? Indirectly, yes.) Wise about words and about the world, Hennessey's poems cut no corners, though they are full of the melancholy wisdom that hides in coverts, closets, hope-chests, crevices, and other concealed places. I praise Hennessey's talent, his ardor-packed process, and the shapeliness of the results. --Wayne Koestenbaum

--Wayne Koestenbaum

Christopher Hennessy's poems yearn for a sense of certainty, feel their way for a foothold that, ultimately, may not be there. From childhood poems of family and farm (as unsettling, in their vivid realism, as Roethke's greenhouse poems) to persona poems of deep erotic longing, Hennessy maintains an artful and risky determination, in each poem, to understand the need its song speaks. --David Trinidad

Christopher Hennessy gets the rhythm right, the timbre right, and the heart-sense right. Every detail is in place, and the whole ensemble sings. There's hard labor behind these poems in Oscar Wilde's sense, and in Emily Dickinson's. (Did Emily talk about hard labor? Indirectly, yes.) Wise about words and about the world, Hennessey's poems cut no corners, though they are full of the melancholy wisdom that hides in coverts, closets, hope-chests, crevices, and other concealed places. I praise Hennessey's talent, his ardor-packed process, and the shapeliness of the results. --Wayne Koestenbaum