Ab? Nuw?s (d.c.814) is invariably counted, by his contemporaries and modern scholars alike, as a genius of the medieval Arab poetic tradition. His mordant wit, effervescent bravado, and his unabashed love for wine, pederasty and all things forbidden have not only lent to his notoriety as a court poet but have made him a legendary figure in the Arab imagination. Although the vast range of his poetic repertoire reflects a verve and versatility virtually unmatched by his predecessors, Ab? Nuw?s is especially celebrated for his mastery of the wine poem or khamr?ya. Trained in the Iraqi cities of Basra and K?fa, where licentious poetry enjoyed the greatest popularity, Ab? Nuw?s saw the height of his career in the ‘Abb?sid capital of Baghdad where he composed some of his most exquisite masterpieces of wine praise. Considered by scholars to be an apogee of the ‘modern’ (muh?dath) or urbane aesthetic which privileged the highly sophisticated use of rhetorical figures known as bad?‘ (‘innovative’) and which dismissed the topoi of the classical ode as archaic, Ab? Nuw?s’s unique contribution to the wine poem consists primarily in his highly astute crafting of a rhetorical game whereby the values of religious and poetic systems of thought are antagonized, violated and subverted in such a way as to sublimate and sanctify forbidden desire, often using the very religious discourse which would prohibit it. Through a close reading of the descriptive and structural elements of one of his celebrated wine songs, I show how wine (khamr), the ‘drink’ and the ‘figure,’ constitutes the erotic impetus of this rhetorical game. I show first how the poet’s erotic relation to wine (khamr) is the primary topic of the poem and how this erotic desire for wine signifies the desire to be seduced by an erotically excessive ‘object’ that can neither be consumed as a ‘drink’ nor apprehended as an ‘image’ or ‘figure.’ My reading of the poems thus emphasizes first, that the poet is so intoxicated by the love of wine that he acts both as an erotic and rhetorical ‘ seducer’ and second, that this activity of ‘seduction,’ at once ‘erotic’ (homoerotic) and ‘rhetorical,’ is achieved through the magical ‘craft’ of wine the ‘drink’ and the ‘figure.’ Ultimately, I show how the wine song of Ab? N?w?s can be read both as a reflection on and performance of the seductive, intoxicating, and liberating experience of poetry itself.