Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, by Samuel R. Delany. Drawn by Mia Wolff

Juno Books, 44 pages, $14.99

Samuel R. Delany is a poet of the urban, particularly of New York. The grit and swank of Gotham permeates his work: his recently released Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is a personal and sociological study of gentrification and public sexuality, and the city informs his autobiography Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand as much as Dublin shapes Ulysses or London Mrs. Dalloway. Even the Neveryona science-fiction series (which won him a host of Nebula and Hugo Awards) and his most famous intergalactic sci-fi work, Dhalgren, are essentially urban adventures charged with Manhattan energy and imagery.

This doesn't change with Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, Delany's first graphic novel. Beautifully illustrated by Mia Wolff, Bread and Wine tells the simple story of how Delany met and fell in love with his partner, Dennis. As with all great love stories, its tension lies in the sweetness and tentativeness of the characters' emerging emotions.

In first-person narration, Delany explains how he and Dennis, a homeless man selling books from a blanket and his supermarket cart on West 72nd Street, became friends and, eventually, lovers. After weeks of chatting and sharing coffee on the street, they have their first date at the Skyline Motel, a trucker favorite, in Midtown. There, Dennis takes off his shoes for the first time in three months, and showers in a private bath for the first time in six years. The sex is great -- and Wolff's drawings express its exuberance, well, graphically. Soon Dennis is living with Delany in Amherst, where Delany teaches comparative literature at UMass.

In Bread and Wine Delany does a miraculous job of mixing romantic myths with raw material realities. Dennis's socks are literally rotting on his feet in the motel room, and he nearly misses their motel date when he gets diarrhea and has to hunt around Central Park for a private place to shit. But there are moments of sublime beauty, as when Dennis takes Delany's hand for the first time, or confesses that he has never in his life eaten mushrooms or known that there were "two kinds of syrup." Delany's direct, poetic prose -- annotated with copious quotes from Friedrich Holderlin's poem "Bread and Wine" -- is movingly enhanced by Wolff's drawings, which are half comic strip, half hallucinogenic tour through the characters' fantasies. Bread and Wine is affecting and sometimes shocking in its ability to manifest -- in word and image -- the inner world of love in the middle of an all-too-physical world.

--Michael Bronski