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THOM GUNN (1929–2004), though widely recognized as a major British poet of the later 20th century, has often been marginalized by a literary establishment that has never been able to deal fully with his evocative, and explicitly gay, poetry. The publication of Gunn’s letters represents the start of what the poet Andrew McMillan has called “a welcome rebalancing.” As well as providing an intimate portrait of Gunn, the letters also give an insight into the origins of this imbalance. An unmistakable thread running through his letters is the extent to which he was forced to negotiate with a hostile culture as a poet who was a gay man.

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IN 2009, Heather Love’s first book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History established her as a soft-spoken rock star in the world of Queer Theory. Why, then, in a panel discussion uploaded to YouTube from 2016, did she attest that she was in the middle of a “personal crisis in the humanities”? She expressed impatience with the limits of her academic training and wanted to test its assumptions. That prompted her to ask a question that’s usually lobbed by skeptics: “What is Queer Theory about?” Her answer can be found in a new book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory.

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AUTHOR Anthony Veasna So died of a drug overdose on December 8, 2020. His first book, the short story collection Afterparties, was published on August 3, 2021, and was named one of the top 100 Notable Books of 2021 by The New York Times—almost a year after his death.

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KISS THE SCARS on the Back of My Neck is a collection of short stories, many of them featuring gay Black men. Several, including the title story, are linked by two recurring characters whose lives are depicted from childhood to adulthood in separate tales, until the final story brings them together.

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THE PLOT of The Days of Afrekete is set in motion on page one when the reader learns that the husband of one of the main characters is facing jail time. The stage is fleshed out a couple of pages later as the narrator observes: “Liselle’s forty-one years of research suggested that no matter how distant, abusive, judgmental, unloving, and useless one’s mother was, one called her when things fell apart.” … The novel’s title invokes Afrekete, a figure in Audre Lorde’s woman-centered biomythography Zami and provides a secret code word of alarm between the two women lovers whose college romance haunts the narrative.

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            In Brocken Spectre, the present moment is always haunted, not only by the past, but by the suggestion of something divine that can never be adequately named or proved. The poems grapple with questions of faith from the perspective of an uncertain believer. “Once, I believed in God,” he admits in “Golden Gate Park.” But for all his admitted uncertainty, that space where belief once stood inside him still feels largely occupied. All of the poems remain alert to evidence that there’s more to life than that which we can rationally perceive.

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JEFFREY ESCOFFIER [who is interviewed in this issue] is one of the founders of LGBT studies and an early promoter of lesbian and gay writers. His career has spanned diverse fields, from his graduate work in economics in the 1970s when he also became active in gay academics and politics.

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A   LOVE TRIANGLE involving a policeman, his male lover, and the lover’s wife is the subject of Bethan Roberts’ new novel My Policeman. Set in 1950s England, the story was inspired by novelist E. M. Forster’s long-term relationship with policeman Bob Buckingham and his wife May. The novel is currently being made into a major motion picture for release in 2022 starring actor and singer Harry Styles (Dunkirk), actress Emma Corrin (The Crown), and British actor David Dawson.

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            This story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures.

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            Wilkinson’s book is about his search for his father and, by extension, his roots and his identity. There was a great-grandfather who hailed from the Canary Islands and stowed away on a ship bound for Uruguay. But even this flimsy fact is cause for disappointment: “No one in my family now knows or cares what he did or why.”

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