Once It's Over

In Once It's Over, Lloyd David Aquino captures the always-fleeting-wish and want, starlight and chance-as we witness the tangled trajectories of Adam and Madeline's tumultuous relationship. Their lives cross and miss, and we mine what that missing means. This wonderful debut showcases the ecstasy and ache of intimacy. Aquino measures the sudden fullness of loss, as "Fragility beckons for a mirror image." In these poems, laughter cracks to pieces, and Aquino is prepared, as the most thoughtful poets are, to make certain those pieces do not fall away.

-Michael Torres, author of An Incomplete List of Names

The end of a love between two people is awful in countless ways that reduce most of us to silence. Lloyd David Aquino challenges that silence with poetic acts of recall that recreate stages and moments in the formation of a bond that is always already in the process of dissolving. Eyeglasses are exchanged, dances are performed, and an almost dialogue articulates itself between two lovers who don't speak the same language but who remain trapped in adjacent dramas of limbs and desires. And yet. The end isn't the end. This collection operates like a simultaneous intervention on and aesthetic act of solidarity with any reader who has loved and lost. And who hasn't?

-Stephanie Barbé Hammer, How Formal? and Rescue Plan.

In Once It's Over, Lloyd David Aquino has created a kind of masterpiece. It is a novel in poems detailing the romantic or unromantic life of Adam and Madeline, characters he has written about in previous work, but never so thoroughly or deeply. In them, we see the modern problem of relationships, they are deeply feeling and deeply lonely even when they are not alone because they have such a hard time relating to each other. In this, Aquino has drawn out what is true to so many people, the harsh reality that they are alone no matter who they are with or what they are doing. He shows us the pain that is buried so deeply in so many of us. This is an amazing collection.

-John Brantingham, Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park