Judge Fleda Brown’s comments: “When a sonnet is good, it holds in a great deal of passion, using the struggle of the lines to keep it from flying apart in anguish. Here is a poem, maybe the only one like this I’ve seen, that eulogizes the ‘Edenic interval’ before AIDS began its rampage in the gay communities. The voice in the poem is authentic, the language interesting (‘Tremont Street’s raffish, doggy side’) and sometimes perfect--‘that bony white cane.’ Although the couplet feels weaker than the rest, the end-rhymes ‘like this’ and ‘abyss’ do exactly what they need to do, pull us into the darkness.”