To run for your life and be naked, literally and figuratively; to be pursued by your past, eyed and tracked by those you left behind; to be penniless and know you have to build a new life from scratch--finding a way in the eye of that storm is what Ojo is about. It surveys the failures presented by old ways of doing things. It celebrates possibility, novel ways of creating a world, even as the old ways haunt a person. But most of all it's a story of finding love in the 1980's, in the west, in cowboy country, at the start of the HIV pandemic.

"This moving, challenging novel of a young gay man coming of age in the 1980s pulses with moments of connection and freedom, explored in prose that exults in its own liberation: “Thus time, tortoise and torturous, hale and hare. Rich in paradox, it travels. At a rate of 67,000 miles per hour. It catapults us with a flaming center.” The narrative explores the lives of gay men at the onset of the HIV pandemic in Ojo Caliente, a “neon mountain town” whose stretch of New Mexico seems intent on “formaldehyding the past.” The narrator, meanwhile, is facing past and present in incandescent sentences, as he makes new friends, explores his sexuality with an array of men—from those not openly "out" to those with women at home—and contemplates relationships he’s left behind, all as he vows “to scramble, leave the state, go for good.” -- Booklife