This new chapbook presents a selection of poems celebrating gay love, and lamenting its loss, translated by Gregory Woods, one of the UK’s leading gay poets. As men pass each other in public spaces, sustained eye contact may lead to either extreme pleasure or pain. Enclosed, rented rooms may provide safe privacy or constrictive isolation. Subject to intense social stigma but refusing to be silenced, poets such as Lorca and Cavafy, Umberto Saba, Luis Cernuda, Salvador Novo, Mikhail Kuzmin, Antonio Botto and Vicente Aleixandre proudly defied convention while dodging censorship. The book is illustrated with paintings from the modernist period by artists including Paul Cadmus and Duncan Grant, as well as contemporary painters such as Dale Lewis.