HERE 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.
More
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.
More
Reviews of the books Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film<,em>, Dinner on Monster Island: Essays, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide, Imperative to Spare, One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field, and XXX, and the exhibit George Platt Lynes at Work: The Gary Haller Collection
More
A NEW COLLECTION titled The Selected Shepherd is a very welcome arrival that may encourage readers to rediscover an award-winning, fiercely intelligent poet, anthologist, and critic. Gone much too soon at the age of 45, Reginald Shepherd showed in his increasingly stronger collections that he was well on his way to becoming a major force in American poetry.
More
Reviews of Coachella Elegy, The City Aroused, Adam in the Garden, Born this Way Science: Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, American Poly: A History, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II, and Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II.
More
Brief reviews of TEN BRIDGES I’VE BURNT: A Memoir in Verse; DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA; MATERIAL WEALTH: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg; BOUND: Poems; and IN THE SPIDER’S ROOM: A Novel.
More
Interview with poet, Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.
More
Homeland of My Body is a substantial compilation of poems from four earlier collections, along with many new poems. Blanco includes references to his private life in many of his works, but he does not write primarily about gay life. Instead, it is his Cuban ancestry and family members that shine through like a Havana sunrise. Ancestry, family history, and Cuban customs are so much at the heart of his œuvre that the theme of gay love is moved to the periphery.
More
Yone Noguchi, this handsome Japanese poet from California, might possibly be the New Kid, someone who was young, racially
exotic, and very talented.
For in this quiet novel (Mother’s Boy) — and Gale’s fiction grows quieter and quieter, so even a bomb blast is muffled—Gale refuses to judge his characters. I sense that this is from a genuine generosity of spirit, a desire to allow the characters time to develop on their own. Quietly we learn that to become a mother’s boy requires the cooperation of both the mother and the boy, and it may lead, as in the case of Charles Causley, to some of the finest poems of his generation.
More
