"Ace Boggess's ESCAPE ENVY is a book of reckoning, a poetry collection that takes clear-eyed but tender measure of what we lose when we lose ourselves-to addiction, heartache, incarceration, and to time's ravenous passage. In richly layered love poems, elegies, and portraits of minor catastrophes, Boggess examines what imprisons us and what can set us free. Sometimes, the beauty of a rose garden saves us as "[w]e...

"Ace Boggess's ESCAPE ENVY is a book of reckoning, a poetry collection that takes clear-eyed but tender measure of what we lose when we lose ourselves-to addiction, heartache, incarceration, and to time's ravenous passage. In richly layered love poems, elegies, and portraits of minor catastrophes, Boggess examines what imprisons us and what can set us free. Sometimes, the beauty of a rose garden saves us as "[w]e breathe in until we suffocate / from pleasure." Sometimes, a person's recollected love continues, despite long absence, to salvage us "again & again ad infinitum." And always, there are poems, like these poems, offering us succor, singing us home."

-Francesca Bell, author of BRIGHT STAIN