Sometimes I buy slim volumes of poetry at McKay’s on a whim, a handful at a time, because they’re $1.50 and I feel that I can afford to take a chance on serendipity. Anesthesia was one of those books. I had never heard of Kenny Fries, but something about the medical title caught my eye and seemed relevant in 2020, a year in which I thought a lot about bodies, medicine, sickness, and surgery, for a variety of reasons. The poems in Anesthesia deal with physical disability and AIDS, and with sexuality and love shared between gay men. They are physical, sensual pieces of writing that complicate ideas of what a sick or disabled body can do; they contain bittersweetness, acceptance, joy, and violence.