AMERICAN POET Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002) and his “surrogate son” Indra Tamang share a chapter in Scott Herring’s intriguing, fact-filled, opinion-strewn book of bio-criticism, Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, which focuses on six 20th-century Modernist artists and writers.
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Selby Wynn Schwartz’s experimental novel is a philosophical portrait of woman as creator. The novel’s homocentric text digresses, entangles, and slides down a rabbit hole into the lives of queer women from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, After Sappho forces the question of female creativity in literature and art: is it equal in originality to male creativity?
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In this memoir, Shakur searches for emotional and political meaning in a country that can no longer hide from its racist past. We follow his political and personal journeys from Ohio, back to Jamaica, to the Philippines, to France, and to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His dramatic disappointment at the lies and compromises that ripple through the American Dream, particularly for immigrant families, is lamented in ways both poignant and painful.
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Reviews of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, My Mother Says, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, Swollening: Poems, Friedrich Nietzsche (Critical Lives), and the album Homosexual by Darren Hayes.
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This novel shows that the struggle to come out, due to the strictures of the dominant society, has always been painful and hard won. We like to think that same-sex love isn’t just defensible but also beautiful, not only in its normalizing Pete Buttigieg version, imitative of heterosexual marriage, but also in its quirkiest manifestations.
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ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE, Seán Hewitt’s splendid new memoir, is haunted by ghosts. “Everything, once you start to look,” he observes, “is haunted.” There are the ghosts of a Catholic faith he abandoned; the ghost of his dead father; the ghost of the gay Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poetic mentor; the ghost of the once grand city of Liverpool, “dragging itself up out of its own grave”; and the ghost of Hewitt’s closeted gay youth. … But most of all, …
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Sullivan stresses throughout the book that one of the failures of lesbian activism was an inability to move beyond a white framework and genuinely build coalitions with communities of color. Today, lesbian bars have adapted and do exist, albeit in much smaller numbers. They are more inclusive, frequented by a mixed clientele that is aware of the bars’ status as safe space and chooses them for that reason.
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I could go on. Every page of Narrow Rooms has at least one sentence that stops me cold. As the reviewer of the biography noted, everyone who writes about Purdy winds up urging readers to do themselves the favor of discovering him. I now do the same.
MoreOVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.
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Writing a Chrysanthemum teems with intense, mysterious feeling. There’s something unhinged about the work (one of Barton’s benefactors called him “crazy as a bedbug and impossible to cope with”) that is both bizarre and intriguing. It defies the norms we know, as does Barton, who considered himself not an artist but a writer
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