Blue 4 U, by Nicholas Teixeira

BLUE 4 U hits you, I mean me (“U n I r so close on the keyboard, / I can’t help but hit the wrong one when I want U”), like a teen text message from the 1990s, except it’s written by James Joyce, after stewing for several decades in TMS (The Muppet Show). Every letter is precious — this is love squeezed up — brave and banal, generous and desperate like an awkward, idiosyncratic present: “for valentine’s day i got you a 7-eleven gift card. i had to explain to you it was cuz you were born 11/7.”  Gracious, queer, tragic, hilarious: it’s impossible not to be touched by this radically original, radically tender work.

– Václav Paris, author of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic (Oxford University Press)

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The poems in BLUE 4 U are a journey through a shape-shifting house of dream, risk, and longing. No line reads the same way twice, creating a choose-your-own stream-of-consciousness adventure so masterful that you’ll float in the turquoise waters of its past, present, and future long after closing its pages. From wordplay to foreplay, Muppets to memoir, Teixeira’s poetry composes its own exalted music of the great potentials in innocence and desire, drawing together the unexpected and blowing apart the fatal sameness in things. “earth control to birth control,” surrender and be transformed.

 – Jennifer Hasegawa, author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living(Omnidawn)