Paul Monette began his writing life as a poet. For ten years he worked exclusively in that genre, producing two much-admired collections, The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975) and No Witnesses (1981). Monette then turned to writing novels and did not return to poetry until almost a decade later, when AIDS cut down his lover, Roger Horwitz.

Sporadically during Roger's twenty-month illness, Monette began to experiment with a form that would express the careening anxiety and the overwhelming sense of exile that had engulfed the two men. After Roger died in 1986, Monette wrote a stunning series of elegies for his friend, a monumental and wholly original effusion of the fury and madness of grief. Those elegies appeared from St.

Martin's Press in 1988 as Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, garnering many awards and changing the face of AIDS in literature. Since then he has written a varied group of poems, some more formal, some in a torrent of language reminiscent of Love Alone.

1. In West of Yesterday, East of Summer, this impressive body of work has been brought together to reveal the extraordinary diversity of his career as a poet, from the sublime to the heroic. Monette has provided an illuminating Introduction which places the work in context and challenges the very idea of what poetry is for.