Love the Stranger
by Jay Deshpande ’02
YesYes Books, November 2015
Through the wide-eyed study of beauty and the eerie stations of the erotic, Love the Stranger maps the body in its struggle with desire and absence. The poems treat love, kinship and loss as instruments of our own awakening — tools that can help us encounter our own mysteriousness and touch new ground. As they peer into childhood memory, the end of an affair, dream dismemberments, and even Kim Kardashian, the lyrics in Love the Stranger guide us toward the truths hidden within the body.
Jay Deshpande is the winner of the Scotti Merrill Memorial Award, selected by Billy Collins in 2015. He has held residencies at the Saltonstall Arts Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Jay’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Sixth Finch and Narrative. His essays and reviews have been published in Slate, The New Republic, Boston Review and Jacket2. Jay has previously worked for WatchTime magazine and the Academy of American Poets, and served as poetry editor for AGNI. He lives in Brooklyn.