This important and passionate collection presents the work of forty-two American poets whose vision and language bear the impress of the AIDS pandemic, now almost in its third decade. It complements Poets for Life (Persea), the classic anthology of poetry on AIDS, and is also an update, presenting a poetry different from what has gone before, in which the elegist leaves the bedside to look at the whole fractured world, the world as it is, with AIDS in it.

With its generous selections of the poets' works, as well as their brief personal remarks on the relationship of their poetry to their experiences of AIDS, Things Shaped in Passing bears witness to the extremity of our moment.