Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin reflects on the ways love and sex can ruin us--our bodies, our contentment, our sense of self--but can also grant us an almost spiritual knowledge of the human. Structured around the life of a central speaker born into a world where love is a fever, a sickness, Donnelly's masterful volume moves through deserted New England mill towns, the sexual abandon of the 1980s gay demimonde, and (in several translations) medieval imperial Japan, searching out the spirit that survives ruin.