IN What Is the Grass, a dazzling and discursive meditation on Walt Whitman’s poetry, Mark Doty sets out to “see and say” all that his attention is drawn to—both the poetic and the personal—“lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase.”
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HOW WE FIGHT for Our Lives is a deeply compelling and personal memoir about growing up black and gay in a world where being either can be challenging, and the combination can be deadly.
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Reading Love Unknown is like touring Bishop’s word-ridden, complex, and stirring worlds. With an atlas and a book of her poems close by, it delivers a highly satisfying ride.
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The manuscript of Poems Written Abroad was unearthed not long ago in a Midwestern university library and is printed here for the first time. It dates from the summer of 1927, when Spender was a mere eighteen years old.
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WHEN Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and American student Philip Cummings first met and became lovers in Madrid in July 1928, they had no idea that their brief liaison would evolve into an intimate relationship that spanned two continents and almost three years. Despite their disparate backgrounds and ages (Lorca was thirty, Cummings 21), they had much in common: …
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McKuen’s turning point coincided with 1967’s Summer of Love, when hippies and other nonconformists took their rebellion against conventional norms into the streets. His stance as a melancholy nonbinary romantic placed him on the more conservative end of the counterculture. It was his ability to connect with the heartaches and longings of countless “ordinary” people that put him in sync with the moment.
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MARY OLIVER, one of the most beloved and best-selling American poets—who happened to be a lesbian—died of lymphoma in Hobe Sound, Florida on January 17, 2019 at the age of 83.
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Camp Marmalade by Wayne Koestenbaum Nightboat Books. 409 pages, $18.95 Camp Marmalade sounds like a nice place to send gay boys for the summer, but since it…More
[Lisa Dordal’s] poetic tales are plainly told, but they shed light on complex experience, including enduring loss, battling depression and grief, and coming to recognize and celebrate her lesbian self. Finding strength in her voice as a poet is a pivotal discovery.
MoreAFTER DISCOVERING the writings of Boston- and San Francisco-based poet John Wieners (1939– 2002), I was left with a sense of literary regret: Where have you been all my life?
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