So many of the books that spoke to both me and other lesbian and feminist activists in the 1970s–the books that helped us make sense of our lives and of the world–aren’t read much anymore. Times change. Interests change. So that’s natural enough. But damn, I don’t want them to be lost. I’d like to call us back to the passion and the ambition of those ground-breaking times. I want LGBTQ+ writers to work as if our words could change the world, because we never know in advance which ones will.
A Decent World is about love and grief and politics.
The central character, Summer, is grieving for Josie–the grandmother who raised her, the force that held the family together, and a lifelong Communist. Josie’s death leaves Summer wrestling with her emotional and political inheritance. Will she stay in contact with the mother who abandoned her? Why was Josie’s brother exiled from the family? Does she want to stay with Shar, who’s part of a polyamorous household? And above all, can a small group of ordinary people really change the world?
I read Patience and Sarah when I was coming out, and even though by then an entire lesbian community was within easy reach, it still brought me the news that I wasn’t alone. Not that I didn't already know that in an abstract sort of way, but on a gut level it was news all the same.
The book spoke to my overcharged emotions at a time when I was still isolated. It’s the only book I remember ever hugging.
Important historical novel with lesbian characters based on real women. It was originally self published as A Place for Us. Includes afterword by Isabel Miller [pseudo of Alma Routsong].
I knew Jim, so I’m biased, but he was a fine poet–one of the real ones, as another poet said of him.
He isn’t as well known as he should be. He writes simply, honestly, and beautifully. Some of his poems make me want to weep, no matter how many times I read them.
Instead of telling you about the book, I’ll get out of the way and quote from one poem:
“Sometimes I’m their first. / Sweet, sweet men. / I light candles, burn the best incense. / Make them think it’s some kind of temple / and it rather is. // Like this guy who hauled parts for a living, / whatever the hell that means. / He was like caught light through glass, / and so the candles and the incense. / What would you do with a new colt? // He touched my body the way shadows fall / from an old subject he’d buried, / and he looked at me without fear.”
The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark Doty
James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies―originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death―has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available―clear, passionate, and hard-earned.
The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American…
Beginning with O came out in the 70s, when a feminist or lesbian poet could fill an auditorium, and often did. Broumas's poems are physical, compelling, and intelligent, like this one, which reaches for a forgotten language from a time when women were whole and unafraid of their power.
Again, let me get out of the way and quote: “I work / in silver the tongue-like forms / that curve around a throat // an arm-pit, the upper / thigh, whose significance stirs in me / like a curviform alphabet / that defies // decoding, appears / to consist of vowels, beginning with O, the O- / mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound. / What tiny fragments // survive, mangled into our language. / I am a woman committed to / a politics / of transliteration, the methodology // of a mind / stunned at the suddenly / possible shifts of meaning–for which / like amnesiacs // in a ward on fire, we must / find words / or burn.“
Imaginative and uninhibited, Beginning with O is the 72nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets
This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, of unabashed eroticism; at the same time it is a work of integral imagination, steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet's heritage and imbued with an intuitive sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions, high style, and musical form.
Again, I’ll admit to being biased. Ida’s my partner and we’ve been together for well over 40 years, so I’ve known this book from its earliest stages. But biased or not, I haven’t lost my critical abilities: it’s good.
Kate Porter's father is the head of a right-wing militia. She's just been released from prison after her father pushed her to participate in a bank robbery and it led to a teller's death.. Now that she’s free, all she wants to do is bring down her father’s militia, reunite with the woman she loves, and get a decent meal. But a lot has changed while she was behind bars.
Kate Porter emerges from prison after serving a 12-year reduced sentence, having turned state's evidence against her right-wing militia father. But if she thinks she has found freedom to start over in a changed world, she is mistaken. Almost immediately she is recruited as an informant. Her job? To track down her father who is still at large and living underground. She knows that as soon as she makes a move, she will set off an alarm, and her father's minions will begin tracking her. Equally well-trained as a soldier, she hopes they will lead her to her father, and…
I’m stretching the category here. The Pull of the Stars was marketed as a mainstream novel and it’s more recent than my other picks, so you may have heard of it. It’s a compelling book, and when it turns to same-sex attraction in the final pages, it closes a circle that by then is crying out to be closed. But what I love about it is that the story engages with a full world: the 1918 flu epidemic, the stifling hand of the Church in Ireland, the demands of nursing at a time when medicine could do so little.
I love it when LGBTQ+ writers engage not only with LGBTetc issues but with the world at large.
In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews).
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a plan for a private golf course on wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep historic trees and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have to learn to cooperate with other islanders--including Captain Courtney, who might just morph from irritant to irresistible once James learns a secret that's been kept from him for years.
Loner James Malloy is a ferry captain-or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a girl named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island's daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a private golf course staked out across wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, a Narragansett Indian, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep rocky bluffs, historic trees, and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have…
