In a row of sunlight

András Petőcz longs in his bones for the great love affaire that will be Europe. I know no one as passionately European as my friend Andras, and I know no European poet as close in spirit to revolutionary Americans like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Reading these poems, you feel free and alive. Poets from the Old World and the Americas find one another in the United States, where we discover a "melting pot" of identity that is not, after all, uniquely or even particularly American. Citizens of the remains of old empires (including the Soviet, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian) and former occupied nations interact in New York, Chicago, and a small town in Iowa. Unreconstructed heterosexual men encounter post-feminist women and fluid sexualities and genders; sarcasm strips away hypocrisy's contradictions, revealing at the same time frustration and longing.