So Much for Life: Selected Poems

Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt's work -survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it's tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry--"hot and tender," funny and sad--tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.