Giving a voice to the voiceless while making the unseen visible has been one major preoccupation of contemporary British poetry since the 1980s. Andrew McMillan’s debut collection Physical, which exposes gay male desire in a raw, unflinchingly honest, and sometimes shocking way, has gained him a large array of critical accolades. The poems’ confessional exploration of the male body does not lead to a celebration of virility and strength; instead, they insist on its frailty and pay attention to the invisible details and changing rhythms of intimate relations. This paper aims at showing that, despite McMillan’s insistence on physicality and concreteness, his work is also, and probably mostly, about exposing the unseen vulnerability of male experience. It attempts to demonstrate that the celebration of those bodies is a way to overcome several layers of invisibility: the taboo of gay sexuality, a certain male repression of the truth of decay and mortality, and the unspoken, fleeting rhythms of desire. The article then focuses on McMillan’s celebration of the male body’s vulnerability: in his poems, the drive for sincerity leads to a vulnerable mode of writing where the fragility of physical existence is granted a surprising and paradoxical form of holiness. It finally looks at McMillan’s typographic exposure of breath as a sign of vulnerability in a collection devoid of any punctuation. In conclusion, it suggests that the risk-taking inherent in McMillan’s ethical and aesthetic ambition could be fruitfully interpreted in parallel with his experience as a performer of his work.