In About to Be Young , his debut collection of poems, Monroe Lawrence sets out to write the most emotional poetry that he can. The sequence of poems, of which selections have appeared in venues such as Best American Experimental Writing, The Capilano Review, The Brooklyn Review, Flag + Void, and Prelude Mag , deploy plain language, grammatical torque, and organic visual forms to investigate issues of memory, family, queer sexuality, and shame. Throughout the sequence, he takes the poet John Wieners’s injunction that he must write “the most embarrassing thing” as a rule, and indulge in the absolute lyric impulse to be plangent: to cringe and sing.