In Safe Danger, here comes a Stephen Zerance poem sashaying down the street: snakeskin tights, clean-shaven legs, black tee--why it could be Satan himself. It's a far cry from the baggy khakis and extra large shirt Zerance's father would have him wear, clothes sure to make him feel like a real man. No dice. Instead, Zerance has demons under his bed and phobias--mosquitos, bees, roaches, spiders, ticks--a veritable house of horrors, his pain and longing all the more powerful for their formal restraint. These are elegant poems, knife thin, taut and edgy.

BARBRA GOLDBERG

The post-apocalypse is happening now and in Baltimore in the steamy, exciting poems of Stephen Zerance's Safe Danger, in which the mythic is mashed against the everyday to produce a strange and intoxicating juice fermented with pieces of his own body and accented with notes of lyric intensity.

DAVID BERGMAN

Stephen Zerance's Safe Danger is an anxious book, a book about desire and dread, worry and wonder, about how it's possible to fear what feeds us. These marvelously brutal poems speak the body always on the verge of its own undoing, the body that is "all meat, learning how to suffer." A skillful debut: artfully written, painfully naked, and radically disruptive.

AARON SMITH