Safe Danger - Softcover

In Safe Danger, here comes a Stephen Zerance poem sashaying down the street: snakeskin tights, clean-shaven legs, black tee--why it could be Satan himself. It's a far cry from the baggy khakis and extra large shirt Zerance's father would have him wear, clothes sure to make him feel like a real man. No dice. Instead, Zerance has demons under his bed and phobias--mosquitos, bees, roaches, spiders, ticks--a veritable house of horrors, his pain and longing all the more powerful for their formal restraint. These are elegant poems, knife thin, taut and edgy.-BARBRA GOLDBERG
The post-apocalypse is happening now and in Baltimore in the steamy, exciting poems of Stephen Zerance's Safe Danger, in which the mythic is mashed against the everyday to produce a strange and intoxicating juice fermented with pieces of his own body and accented with notes of lyric intensity.
--DAVID BERGMAN
Stephen Zerance's Safe Danger is an anxious book, a book about desire and dread, worry and wonder, about how it's possible to fear what feeds us. These marvelously brutal poems speak the body always on the verge of its own undoing, the body that is "all meat, learning how to suffer." A skillful debut: artfully written, painfully naked, and radically disruptive.
-AARON SMITH

In an era when internet celebrity has turned vanity into a kind of cybervangelical endeavor, Stephen Zerance's poems lend gravity and consequence to the examination of the surface self and the body. What does skin reveal via its flushing or its being flayed, and what does a man long to be beneath the cloaking of clothes and starched gender constructions? These questions are often projected against night darkness crackling with noise and anticipation. "I understand nothing at night," our speaker admits--a fitting confession for in the long night of Zerance's Safe Danger  "you are not the expert of your body." Rather than stripping for the camera, these poems impel us to strip for (and down to) our lives.
-KYLE DARGAN

"Stephen Zerance's poetry is the work of a wild original, and the poems in this collection--whose reveries call from madness' ledge--exhibit a restraint and artistry of classical proportions. Tonight, in Rome, the gorgeous ruin of the emperors lies strewn beside the everyday. In SAFE DANGER a certain formal harmony meets our world's deepening dread. Zerance is a formidable poet and these poems are genius in their spare, unflinching gaze into the bath house of the self."
-DAVID KEPLINGER