They are, one could say, butch. Gunn has written more casual, freer verse throughout his career, but none of it quite as funny as these often untitled, almost offhand vignettes. The incisive lines are too many to quote, but here's a selection. Gunn is one of the few poets willing to look with clear eyes at the overlap of desire and violence, to find the stirrings of love in the grimiest of street hustlers and the grimmest pulses of murder. But he's so polite, such a gentleman about it, that you don't realize what you're being hustled into.
Love then makes craning saplings crowd for light, The weak being jostled off to shade and death.
Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings Out of the nest, to spatter on the ground. For love has gouged a temporary hollow Out of its baby-back, to help it kill. But we're asked to postpone our conventional take on the situation, to admit a bemused wonder at the fearful symmetry of it all. Gunn is not, thankfully, one of poetry's respectable elder statesmen, but its tough old tomcat, still gadding about the roofs and alleys. But Boss Cupid shows us otherwise.