In Closet Sonnets, Yakov Azriel turns life as a closeted gay male into an aesthetic form as rigorous as that of the sonnets that make up this fictional autobiography: the speaker’s self-limitation becomes a means of imaginative and rhetorical intensification. Through a shifting weave of images and metaphors—mermen, ancient Greeks, Martians, dream-lovers and real men glimpsed through the bars of heterosexual marriage—Azriel’s character maps every inch of his psychic closet, and, like Dylan Thomas at the end of “Fern Hill,” “sighs in his chains like the sea.” —Joy Ladin