Limerence is the psychological term for passionate romantic infatuation, which differs from other (more hallowed or respected/respectable) forms of love, including platonic, but also filial, mature romantic, and religious. The manuscript details many nodes of limerence, centering on a crown of sonnets, which makes up Part II of the book, which will be read during this presentation. This crown is based on a series of vignettes from real life, of a passionate but doomed love affair González has written about off and on, but never as the center of a book on romantic love. The subtitle ("The Wingless Hour") is drawn from Nella Larsen's unpublished (and lost) novel manuscripts, which in itself was an echo of a line from a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Octavio González is assistant professor of English.

Many of the sonnets from “The Wingless Hour” have been published; one appears in the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, and the other in Anomaly journal. Other poems appear in Arlington Poetry Journal, La Guagua poetry anthology, and González’s first collection, The Book of Ours (Momotombo Press, 2009), among others.

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