The first half of The Shadowgraph centers on a dysfunctional Iowa childhood. …
… The second and more engaging half of the book consists of poems under titles of movies starring Stanwyck. Wonderfully witty as viewing companions, they function on other levels, too.
This book is about Jeremy’s transition and his family’s growth in understanding and acceptance, but it’s also the story of the Ivestors role in becoming advocates for transgender rights. Once a Girl, Always a Boy is a story of an intimate journey that informs the cisgender world about the complexities of gender identity and the importance of familial and social acceptance.
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THE QUEST to discover one’s true identity is a central theme in much of world literature. Zeyn Joukha-dar’s new novel, The Thirty Names of Night, explores this issue from a multiplicity of angles.
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[Unrequited Love] is filled with reminiscences about Altman’s friendships with authors like Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and Edmund White, as well as insightful commentary on other novelists. He notes, for example, that André Aciman, who is straight, gently avoids answering questions about whether Call Me by Your Name is based on his own life experiences.
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[Daryl] Palmer is especially good at digging deeper into Cather’s early stories, which have too often been dismissed or treated as journeywork by past critics.
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There are discussions of beauty and art here, including Wilde’s concern that art should not raise nature on high (reminiscent of J. D. McClatchy’s view that nature was an uncongenial subject for poetry, suitable only as a backdrop for human issues). One of the best is a revisit to Crane’s “The Bridge,” in which the phrase “Appalachian Spring” appears, the source for the title of Aaron Copland’s ballet score (courtesy of Martha Graham).
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The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In, edited by Janine Utell, contains essays by sixteen scholars in the fields of comics studies, gender studies, and popular culture. Bechdel, who lives in Vermont with her wife, artist Holly Rae Taylor, was awarded a Mac-Arthur Fellowship in 2014. This is the first book to focus entirely on scholarship about her major works: Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home, and Are You My Mother?
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No Modernism without Lesbians is important for 2020 because it rips apart the prevailing patriarchal model. What Souhami calls for is abandoning the Modernist canon and rebuilding it one lesbian at a time to create a new, inclusive, 21st-century model. This project will send readers back, not only to a cast of characters that Souhami has spent her life compiling, but to works of others writing about lesbians and their role in supporting and advancing the arts.
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So, was Calamity Jane a lesbian, or what we would call gender fluid, or something else altogether? In light of all the other tall tales and outright lies that were perpetuated by and about her, that question may never be answered.
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Aaron Smith is not exactly at the other end of the spectrum, but his work is far more flippant, colloquial, and funny. For example, the title poem, “The Book of Daniel,” refers not to the Bible but to the actor Daniel Craig, with whom the poet is apparently obsessed. Smith’s poems can be very risible indeed: …
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