“Brad Tice’s What the Night Numbered is a vibrant fresco of a book, portraying the painful and gorgeous stories of Gay Liberation with consummate skill. Tice proves once and for all that formal mastery and sympathetic openness are not opposites, but mutually entailing—twin sources of any art that would respond to the call of necessity. And this is indeed a necessary book. In ‘Psyche’s Third Trial,’ one of Tice’s speakers claims, while writing a letter to his lover, I have this hope // that if I fold the pages tight enough, the pulp / could become a seed. A pit that could // take root in the dirt of those cracks, send out roots, / break apart these streets. These muscular, subtle lines make a fine description of Tice’s own superb poems.”
—Peter Campion, Trio Award Judge, author of El Dorado