Capsid: A Love Song, Paperback/Joseph Osmundson

Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer from rural Washington State. His writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books , The Los Angeles Review , Gawker , Salon , The Rumpus , and The Feminist Wire , where he is an Associate Editor. He's currently a post-doctoral fellow in systems biology at New York University. Osmundson describes Capsid: A Love Song as an essay "On HIV, desire, science, queerness, love." The book is a long-form essay that incorporates eight prose poems, each one inspired by a different phase in the life cycle of HIV. A person infected with a virus is called a host, and that makes the virus the guest, and sometimes a guest becomes a friend, and sometimes a friend becomes a lover. Osmundson explores the intimacy of the relatioinship between an HIV-positive person and his virus. His scientific perspective makes this young gay man an especially poignant singer of this love song.