In Closet Sonnets, Yakov Azriel turns life as a closeted gay male into an aesthetic form as rigorous as that of the sonnets that make up this: fictional autobiography: the speaker's self-limitation becomes a means of imaginative and rhetorical intensification. Through a shifting weave of images and metaphors–mermen, ancient Greeks, Martians, dream-lovers and real men glimpsed through the bars of heterosexual marriage–Azriel's character maps every inch of his psychic closet, and, like Dylan Thomas at the end of 'Fem Hill, ' 'sighs in his chains like the sea.'–Joy Ladin, author of Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders