Robert Bee is a freelance writer who teaches atRutgers University. He has published over 20 short stories and a number of book reviews. In this essay, he focuses on how "The Missing" fits within the dominant themes of Thorn Gunn 's career and responds to the affect of the AIDS crisis within the gay community.

Thom Gunn's poem "The Missing" is taken from his 1992 book, The Man with Night Sweats, a series of poems responding to the AIDS crisis. Gunn, a gay poet living in San Francisco, responds to the crisis in unsentimental, unflinching verse. As Deborah Landau points out in her essay, "How to Live. What to Do: The Poetics and Politics of AIDS": "By exposing the anguish and suffering brought on by AIDS, Gunn chooses an aesthetic strategy that might inspire empathy from readers who have never had a direct experience with the disease." Although other...