Plato's Closet treads indelicately yet with profound subtlety on the subject of community-- the polis and the hinterland it populates with idyllic shepherds to distract from the scapegoats, thieves, heretics, and wolves proliferating there. By deploying an overwrought rhetoric by turns misogynist, melancholic, and masochistic, the poems attempt to trace the invisible curves and lumps of imperial masculinity, whose decadence has finally purified it of its civilized ornamentation-- to the point where it can perhaps be drowned in the bathtub. Plato's Closet' s references range from the classical to Internet porn, Urban Dictionary and gay male fetishism, and features warlords grooming prot g s, female soldiers magically sprouting new hardware, and jilted lovers-- of empire, of wisdom, of war-- whose violent plaints signal the last redoubt of male sexual entitlement.
