"Labors in Vineyards of Desire is a grand, sweeping chronicle of our time, filled with particulars transcendent and mundane, questioned and understood in light of the poet's astonishing erudition and ferocious appetite for life. Gibbons entertains nearly every version of each of our era's events, refracting them through the intensely personal prism of his learning and his longing. I have learned things from this book and from this poet—about my own life—for which I am deeply grateful. I believe it is a masterpiece of autobiography."