Drug And Disease Free : Indolent Books : 9781945023019 : 1945023015 : 15 Apr 2016 : Love is always complicated. In the poems of Drug and Disease Free, Michael Broder ponders the further complexities of love in the context of HIV and AIDS. These include the pleasures of cruising and anonymous sex, the challenges of marriage and erotic power exchange, and the realities of blood, cum and other "proud, shameful mysteries." Broder's narrator is intimate and plainspoken even when formalist; wary but romantic; self-mocking and elegiac; and utterly open--even with "no lube"--to loving and being loved, and all the complications those entail. --Arielle Greenberg [Michael Broder's] Drug and Disease Free makes an important intervention in the canon of contemporary gay poetry, in which so much writing about HIV/AIDS has remained in the realm of elegy. Even as many of these poems find Broder grieving, he is not confined by his status or the pains he has suffered. Ultimately, the triumphant possi