Dear Friend(s)

Animated by many different types of kinship, the poems in Dear Friend(s) explore webs of experience that wind between parents, extended families and friends. They will take readers back to powerful, often early influences, which result from relations of likeness and empathy as well as blood. The long title poem is an elegy - to a specific Dear Friend, dead from AIDS in its earliest years. It's also an elegy for the loss of innocence and freedom of sexual expression that flowed generously in the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and in the US.

Jeffery Sugarman is an American-born poet living in London. He grew up in 1960s Florida when the state was still relatively untrammelled, a bit exotic - swampy, bursting with coconut palms, peacocks and mermaids; shaded by live oaks, draped with grey moss. He has written in various forms all his life: first, architecture and design criticism; then in planning and urban design over a 20-plus years career in New York City, where he lived, and began writing poetry, from the mid-1990s. He moved to London in 2009 with his English husband, and lives on Islington's 'west-side'.