The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is ‘a public organ of private damage.’ The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.

Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker’s Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.