In Half-Off Boys, Dani Putney’s third full-length collection, they build an archive of embodied queer experience that traverses joy to chaos; from ruination to reckoning. As the speaker excavates the depths of their sexuality, they must contend with the complexities of an intersectional queer existence, including the expression of non-binary identity and the bodily reality of being a mixed-race Asian American. The speaker’s journey oscillates between the exterior world, punctuated by a catalog of men who know the speaker primarily through perception and physical interaction, and an interiority caught in the throes of self-revision. An unraveling of self, characterized by meditations on gaze, co-constructed identity, the power dynamics of sex, and one’s complicity in self-immolation, propels the speaker forward as they explore—for better or for worse—what it means to survive. Half-Off Boys serves as both a cautionary tale and a plea for considering the complex structures—the embodied queer experience is not always what it seems.