"Allen Barnett's fiction is true. That is, even when the writing is elegant it is also incisive, heated and revelatory. Each phrase, whether describing alienation or loss, desire or that which is unknowable, lands with a trembling resonance; a graceful touch which can never be forgotten. I'm grateful that his 'fully human' stories have lived to amaze a new generation."-Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories
"Of all the vibrant literature - fiction, memoirs, reporting, criticism, histories - that emerged in the United States during the height of the AIDS epidemic Allen Barnett's The Body and Its Dangers stands out as a dazzling example of how personal and social tragedy can produce brilliant art. Each of these stories deftly and brilliantly exposes the desires, fears, love, and untimely the terrors of being a human and being alive. Barnett's prose is seductive and alluring even as - or especially when - he is gently exposing those the daily disruptive and unsettling realizations that to be human is to be mortal, and to be mortal is to acknowledge the power and beauty of the body."-Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States and co-editor of Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski