“Like Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum and Donald Windham’s Emblems of Conduct, Boyer Rickel’s Taboo is a memoir that is poetic and almost fragmentary. His prose is delicate and sensuous. We watch him grow up through the episodes, and watch as his growing self-knowledge augments sense and memory. A beautiful book.”—Brian Bouldrey, editor of Best American Gay Fiction and book editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Even if I hadn’t known that Boyer Rickel is a poet, I might easily have surmised it, not only because of the direct, graceful, beautiful, and deeply felt writing in his memoir Taboo, but because of the book’s uncommon structure, which eschews Proustian completeness and aims instead for a more scattershot effect. In this age of revenge-seeking, neurotic, self-aggrandizing memoirs, I don’t know of anything quite like this sane and lovely book. I recommend it highly.”—Felice Picano, author of Like People in History