The Switch

Shiv Kotecha

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. The Switch contains three books:
1. an apologia--written as a relay between two fictional characters--for friendship and desire.
2. the result of a residency: "Obedience Residency Manual"
3. a long poem by an angry god.

"Poetry is never lost in a politics of refusal, and even in the most flirtatious behavioral studies of human and non-human desire for connection... Kotecha's ballast is clearly his feeling for the radiance of form-switching itself."--Corina Copp, BOMB, Fall 2018

"Shiv Kotecha does for the word fucking what Catullus did for the word kissing. In The Switch, desire travels everywhere to its surprisingly specific destinations--to body parts aroused in their fashion, like a saint's skull or a cock. Here love is as artificial as a courtly dialogue, and deeply felt, even spiritual. Here the arousal of the fragmented body is contemporary practice. Is one allowed to write such a book? Among the spectacular effects and turns and startling intimacies in THE SWITCH, the most daring is its no-holds-barred pursuit of love."--Robert Glück

"Shiv Kotecha's deeply weird and affecting book THE SWITCH works with prosaic measure and measured prose to compress the mess of everyday sexual feeling, the mess of everyday relating (both on and off the planet of the genital) into these often perfect lines."--Hannah Black