Because My Body Is Paper contains undated work, it’s less about [Gil Cuadros’] evolution as a writer than about our experience of his deeply felt concerns: the pleasures and horrors of the body, the link between spirit and nature, the sense of meaning we can derive from carefully tended relationships.
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AS A POET AGES, he’s often faced with several choices. He can keep doing what he has always done, or he can, by seriously confronting himself, seek another voice. Jason Schneiderman has done the latter brilliantly in his new book, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. He reflects humorously on his life as a poet, often poking fun at himself and his poses. He wrestles with his Jewish heritage by taking on Stalin and the Holocaust, and then delves into the angst of gay divorce.
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AN EVENING WITH BIRDY O’DAY by Greg Kearney Arsenal Pulp Press. 336 pages, $21.95 IN HIS GENTLY COMIC NOVEL An Evening with Birdy O’Day, Greg Kearney manages, among…More
There are moments in Pathologies when Johan is reminiscent of Goethe’s Werther in his suffering and hunger for romance, or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in his desperation and destitution.
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Short reviews of the books Exit Wounds by Lewis DeSimone, Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss, Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco, and Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring; and of the exhibit American Apollo at the Des Moines Metro Opera Festival and Blank Performing Arts Center in Indianola, IA.
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This memoir is the fourth book from the world’s most famous drag queen, who cemented his celebrity status in the 1990s with his hit single “Supermodel” and now inhabits popular culture with his long-running reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, with its many international spin-offs.
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Cynthia Carr’s new, rigorously researched biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar traces the short, difficult, and remarkable life of Candy Darling from her early school years through her painful death from leukemia and lymphoma in 1974 at age 29.
MoreHERE ARE three recent titles from among an abundance of new poetry from independent publishers. The variety and mastery of these poets’ distinctly different voices are exhilarating: Our tribe of LGBT poets contains many song languages, and we need their full range.
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Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life provides illustrative backstories and perceptive insights into Gunn’s life and work. Nott was a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022) and draws upon that research, along with interviews as well as the artist’s notebooks and diaries, to produce the new biography.
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CHARLES BUSCH’S landmark plays for the Theatre-in-Limbo (1984-1991) were the product of a very particular yet short-lived cultural moment, the final flourishing of the Theater of the Ridiculous movement that goes back to the mid-1960s and is most closely associated with Charles Ludlam.
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