Brief Reviews of the books It’s Not the End of the World, Bangkok after Dark: Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies, A Most Infamous Young Swindler: The Short Tragic Life of Thomas Langrel Harris, Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color, Twist, and television series ,Monster: The Ed Gein Story,
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ONE OF THE VIRTUES of having a poet’s œuvre encapsulated in a volume of selected poems is the opportunity it affords not only to evaluate their output but also to see how certain themes have developed over time. Elaine Sexton writes beautifully crafted and understated poems whose concerns appear to be remarkably consistent across more than two decades of published work. They also resonate all the more for their apparent simplicity.
MorePoems by Joe Bishop, Nick Galinaitis,and Robert McDonald
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Swenson’s lesbianism is at the heart of Margaret A. Brucia’s new biography, The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life. Making use of the poet’s extensive diaries, correspondence, autobiographical pieces, and interviews, Brucia has written what is, according to Paul Crumbley and David Hoak, two Swenson scholars who contributed a foreword to the book, “the most intimate study of the poet’s life to date.”
MorePoems by Shanley Smith-Poole, Jonathan Bracker, and Patrick Kindig.
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WHEN YOUNG Jimmy Schuyler told his mother that he was gay, she responded: “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” He began doing “all those things” as soon as he could, starting at about age seventeen. While serving on a destroyer in World War II, he went AWOL and was then medically disqualified owing to his acknowledged homosexuality. With A Day Like Any Other, Nathan Kernan has produced a splendid biography of James Schuyler (1923–1991), a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet who occupied a prominent place in the New York School in the postwar era.
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PERHAPS THERE IS no more famous celebration of madcap fun than “First Fig,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). This gifted writer created extraordinary works while living a remarkable and unconventional life, romancing both women and men. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy said of her work: “The America of the 1920s made two major contributions to the world: skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
MoreSong of Sappho My love for you is a ship without sails, knowing no harbor, sailing from nowhere to nowhere, a game lost cleanly, a Greek tragedy on the…More
The Missionaries I’m splattered in ink, sweatpants, Four Roses T-shirt. A couple of children in their Sunday best knock on my door. They haven’t practiced their introductions very much…More
Argentina In Buenos Aires The thunderstorms Roll in off the pampas Like crashing surf The city is a sand castle Pretty Insubstantial Illusory I fell in love there With a…More
