[10/15/26] Kindig, Patrick: Agape

Saturnalia Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 15, 2026

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The word "agape" can be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it can be read as a noun; in this sense, it signifies the kind of chaste, divine, unconditional love that god has for humankind. On the other hand, it can be read as an adjective; in this sense, it signifies excessive openness, as of a mouth or other bodily orifice. The word thus gestures in two directions at the same time-toward the disembodied love of the spirit and the embodied pleasures of the flesh. In Patrick Kindig's Alma Award-winning second poetry collection, Agape, both senses of the term are at play. A kind of erotic Bildungsroman in verse, the collection charts the development of a single gay speaker from messy, promiscuous boy into married man. It also locates this narrative within a longer history of queer desire, one that ties lust to violence and pleasure to pain. Interlacing erotic poems, poems that explore gay domestic life, and poems that reimagine key figures in Western myth in (homo)erotic terms, the collection as a whole constitutes a timely exploration of what it means for a gay man to love and be loved.