LunchPaperback, 27 October 2000

A direct and moving account of a young man's life in a time of plague.

The richly textured poems in Lunch, companion volume to D. A. Powell's acclaimed debut collection, Tea, tell the story of a life; like a conversation stretched out over many lunch breaks. Hailed as "formally innovative, disjunctive but tender and always emotionally expressive" by Forrest Gander, its poems are both masticatibly small and immensely satisfying. The life in question is bifurcated by the diagnosis of HIV; "time splits," in these layered and evocative poems, as the poet's memories of childhood and adolescence are fractured by the knowledge of adulthood.