Threshold (Emerging Voices) - Softcover

"I'm astonished by what these poems know. From boyhood initiation into beauty as artifice, to full embrace of self in union with a man, all is recalled with love and wonder. Nothing denied, Legaspi conjures the world in voluptuous detail, and the poet's 'disparaged humming body' claims itself, exuberant and triumphant."--Joan Larkin

"Joseph O. Legaspi's Threshold celebrates the wondrous space in which the masculine and feminine energies enrich and unnerve a young man's path to a fully realized self, "immaculate / yet ravaged, tarnished yet holy." These exquisite poems invite us to cross into the "periphery / of sanctuary and danger," farther into the rooms of family and culture, in order to find nourishment in breath, beauty, desire, and love."--Rigoberto González

Threshold enters a landscape of seemingly perpetual in-between, crossing from conventionality to queerness; exploring the fluidity of gender; and translating the hard hold of family. The collection meditates on passageways and what it means to arrive at, and pierce through, thresholds--between countries, past and future, and the threat and security of love.