Two books on Tennessee Williams

THIS BOOK had to happen at some point. Someone had to embrace Whitman as an environmentalist, and thus we have Killingsworth’s Walt Whitman and the Earth, demonstrating yet again that Whitman is larger than himself, extending beyond 19th-century America to embrace the ages. …

“CREATIVE NON-POETRY” is how Richard McCann half-jokingly described his unassumingly moving new book, Mother of Sorrows, at a reading. In a fusion of poetic memoir and fictional prose, McCann gently skews the facts both to guard his own past and to acquire artistic liberties. …

… Same-sex marriage, which a decade ago seemed like a logical-and harmless-extension of civil rights to a group of disfranchised citizens, has instead become one of the key rallying points in the Christian Right’s attempt to merge religion and politics. …

“A FRYING-PAN of shameful loves sizzled loudly all around me,” writes a brilliant, sensitive man in his early forties, remembering the uncontrollable lusts of earlier years, “and theatrical shows seized hold of me.” The writer is not Martin Moran but St. Augustine …