Vernal Thaw: A Novel of Love at a Slant traces the entangling and unraveling of a queer relationship through love and tumult over the course of a year in Vermont. Franky, a young adjunct professor haunted by encounters with violent men, falls into an intense relationship with Vera, an older neurosurgeon shaped by a childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine. As they attempt to build a life together, their shared desire snags on unhealed wounds. An ambiguous darkness drifts between literature, dreams, and reality—ghostly forms beneath the ice, a midwinter house flood, the death of a mutual friend, secret longings—testing the tenuous intimacy between Franky and Vera.