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) * 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 c