ESSENTIAL QUEER VOICES OF U.S. POETRY
Edited by Christopher Nelson
Green Linden Press. 355 pages, $22.
This is a large, sprawling array of poems, an all-comers potluck rather than an well-ordered anthology. There are genuine lights here, and this volume does gather them in, so long as the reader is prepared to do a bit of sifting. The best-known LGBT poets are all here—Frank Bidart, Marilyn Hacker, Ellen Bass, David Trinidad, Mark Doty, Richard Blanco, Kazim Ali, Jericho Brown—though we only get a couple of poems from each. There is also solid work from many poets whose names are not as well-known. One such poet, Boyer Rickel, has what is perhaps the best line in the book: “The desperate will consider a boat made of ice,” a type of vessel that was actually discussed in the U.K. during World War II.
Having read the hundreds of poems in this lexical stewpot without discovering much that was distinctive, let alone memorable, I was startled into attention near the end by Michael Wasson’s unique ”A Boy and His Mother Play Dead at Dawn,” rooted in family stories from the Battle of Big Hole fought between the U.S. Army and the Nez Perce (nimiipuu) in 1877. Wasson, who grew up on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, captures the drama and the tension with a remarkable economy of words.
Alan Contreras
