On one level, Special Subcommittee is an experimental family history of Samuel Solomon's communist, labor-organizer grandparents, told through the sterile language of redacted FBI files and transcripts of congressional hearings. Against these subcommittees of repression, he then invents an ardent and committed lyric of queer communist relation revolving around his chosen family: his friends, lovers, and political comrades. The combination is wild, radical, and subversive. Samuel Solomon is the author of Life of Riley and the co-translator of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin . He teaches at the University of Sussex, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.