Agape

Overview

The word “agape” can be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it can be read as a noun; in this sense, it signifies the kind of chaste, divine, unconditional love that god has for humankind. On the other hand, it can be read as an adjective; in this sense, it signifies excessive openness, as of a mouth or other bodily orifice. The word thus gestures in two directions at the same time—toward the disembodied love of the spirit and the embodied pleasures of the flesh. In Patrick Kindig’s Alma Award-winning second poetry collection, Agape, both senses of the term are at play. A kind of erotic Bildungsroman in verse, the collection charts the development of a single gay speaker from messy, promiscuous boy into married man. It also locates this narrative within a longer history of queer desire, one that ties lust to violence and pleasure to pain. Interlacing erotic poems, poems that explore gay domestic life, and poems that reimagine key figures in Western myth in (homo)erotic terms, the collection as a whole constitutes a timely exploration of what it means for a gay man to love and be loved.

Author Biography

Patrick Kindig is the author of the poetry collection fascinations (Finishing Line Press 2025), the poetry chapbooks all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press 2019) and Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016), and the academic monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (LSU Press 2022). His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, and other journals. In 2020, he collaborated with classical saxophonist Derek Granger on The Quarantine Variations.