Madness is the selected poems of a fictional poet, Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. The poems and biographical commentary reveal the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.