May – June, 2004
… The author of Warrior Poet, Alexis De Veaux, is a poet, playwright, novelist, and the chair of the women’s studies department at the University of Buffalo, New York. In a short and serviceable introduction, De Veaux explains that she divides Lorde’s life into two lives, “before cancer” and “after cancer.” …
MoreTaher (not his real name) was eighteen, a law student, and terrified when I met him. One of his best friends had just been arrested, charged with consensual homosexual conduct-a crime under Egyptian law. …
MoreTHE ONE THING that the average, educated Brit tends to know about Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough and ancestor of both Sir Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, is that she had an intimate relationship with Queen Anne, … Therefore, the first question they tend to ask me, as Sarah Churchill’s most recent biographer, is: “Did they or didn’t they?” …
MoreFIRST you fall in love with the title. You imagine mismatched pieces of fragile china, translucent, in delicate greens and floral pinks. Your mind hand-feeds you memories of sweet petit fours, frosted pastel lavender and yellow, you smell jasmine tea steeping in a perfectly shaped tea pot, steam blooming from the spout like fragrant ghost petals.
Then …
MoreGAY PENITENTS would have found Fra Luigi Sinistrari an understanding confessor, in spite of all that scary talk about torture and flogging and burning at the stake. When you get past the fierce rhetoric of the Inquisition, you find a childlike innocence and the gentle spirit of Saint Francis. It runs contrary to stereotype, but Fra Luigi was a kindly old inquisitor. …
MoreTHE TITLE of Brian Teare’s debut volume of poetry, The Room Where I Was Born, proves apt: it is indeed about origins, about confronting how the room, house, family, town, and finally trauma of our childhood can shape our relationship to self, language, and even our view of history. …
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