“What is the opposite of devastation?” Dawn Lundy Martin asks in Instructions for The Lovers (out now from Nightboat). Her answers are both thorough and tender, having been conceived through the course of the COVID-19 lockdown. Martin writes of a “horny contentedness” found outside of heterosexual monogamy; the “sensation of one’s own vernacular background” as resistance to grammars of subjugation; her sister’s arm draped around her, and the “worlds in that drape.” Moments of pleasure and precarity are seamlessly placed together, as Martin points towards all the possibilities of “loverness.” We consider some of those possibilities for "loverness"—and political community,…

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