Ryan Tracy’s debut collection of poems, Tender Bottoms, explores the pleasures and anxieties of contemporary gay domestic life—the vicissitudes of romantic attachment, aging, fucking, social accountability, politics, and the reliance on life-sustaining pharmaceuticals—refracted in an homage to Gertrude Stein. Complimented by original full-color photographs, the poems hew to and depart from Stein’s style, finding something new to value in her poetic innovations while also asking for something more, not just from Stein, but from the present moment. In poems that range from the limpid to the ornate, the aphasic to the prosaic, a wry map of pleasure and presentiment emerges, pointing the way toward what Stein called “the bottom nature” of modern life.