Books

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Permanent Volta by Rosie Stockton: the Queer Poems of Intimacy We’ve all Needed

And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them.  Rosie Stockton’s collection, Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, May 2021) is equal parts lamentation and psalms: “[W]here I grind the language / out of myself,” they write, and “everyone is invited / to my / biggest storm.” The poems contained in Permanent Volta take on many forms (sestinas, bent sonnets, fragments, prose, etc.) in which readers can find themselves as individuals: “look at how my worlds / want your worlds / look at our worlds / wanting other worlds / porous the mist we / love […]

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“Shoreditch” Celebrates Gay Artifice and Dramatic History

Shoreditch, the title of Miguel Murphy’s newest collection of poetry, is a brilliant if not challenging intellectual tour de force. Named after an area of London that became the center of Elizabethan theater, Shoreditch flourished as a fertile creative neighborhood while the puritanical city authorities of London proper banned the building of raunchy and low-class playhouses. With its breeding ground for minds unlawful and disorderly, and, with Shakespeare, that most sexually ambivalent young genius who introduced a new kind of theater peopled with dramatic historical personas, Murphy has found his objective correlative for his own historical identity. In Shoreditch, Murphy freely […]

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Ruthlessly Corporeal, Fearlessly Beautiful: K-Ming Chang’s “Bestiary”

Reading poet (and Lambda Literary Award finalist) K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary (One World, 2020), is a visceral experience. Its prose is relentlessly, ruthlessly corporeal, and it is fearlessly beautiful. Told from the point of view of Daughter, a Taiwanese American early-adolescence girl, the book deftly threads together three generations of women with each other, land, water, trauma, violence, and love.  Growing up in California, Daughter one day discovers holes in the yard. They multiply in number and depth, and are somehow breathing. They periodically spit out letters from her grandmother, who grew up in Taiwan but lives in another California town.“I, too, […]

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One Man’s Trash is a Glimpse at Humanity Within the Peculiar

Have you ever read a short story that could be a book? The hook in the first line is compelling, immediately drawing you in. The characters are fleshed out and well-written within their limited storylines. The plot is unexpected and keeps you guessing, unsure how it could wrap up in the few remaining pages. It’s so finely done that it could go on for a couple hundred more pages, and you would still be satisfied.  That is how every story left me in Ryan Vance’s debut collection, One Man’s Trash.  The uncanny defines these short stories. Each story provides a gripping, disconcerting […]

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The Tender, Canonical Queerness of “All The Gay Saints”

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s second book of poetry All The Gay Saints, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, is a stunningly sentient collection of ekphrastic love poems inspired by Herman Baspaintings that unpack the intersections and intricacies of rural America, masculinity, queerness, and the body. In “My Body is Constantly Conjuring a Tempest (Or, Weighing the Pros and Cons of Attending My High School Reunion),” “On Trespassing,” and “I Wish All Children Could Touch the Sky At Least Once,” Candrilli creates portals to an “unsafe house” of a “past life,” teeming with toxic masculinity–“raised fists, those/ holes in drywall”–and the generational violence […]

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Page-Turning Thrillers, Bath Haus and Yes, Daddy, Expose Power Dynamics Between Gay Men

With their suggestive titles and gorgeous, pink-suffused covers, P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus and Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s Yes, Daddy seem like frothy beach reads—and, to a certain degree, they are. But woven into twisting plots, shocking scenarios, and lush settings lies a deeper, more disturbing concern: how trauma experienced by young gay men can propel them into unhealthy, even dangerous, adult romantic relationships. In Bath Haus, recovering addict Oliver Park from rural Indiana has everything that should make him happy: his partner, Nathan, a handsome, attentive, and wealthy trauma surgeon; a sprawling townhouse in Washington, DC; and, most importantly, his sobriety. Why, then, in the opening pages, is […]

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Anne Raeff’s “Only The River” Weaves Through Time, Borders, and Desire

“Old man,” he said, for he did not know his name, but the old man did not stir, so he remained in the old man’s bed, waiting for daybreak, watching him sleep, thinking about, if he had to choose, would he choose Pepa or the ship, wondering whether love was just an excuse for cowardice. When dawn came, the old man was still sleeping, so he left him to his dreams and found his way back to the river.” (98) And here we have Anne Raeff’s newest novel, a celebration of time, space, and woven narrative. The novel traces the […]

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From Physique Pictoral to Pornhub, Jeffrey Escoffier’s New Book Charts The Way

This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists. But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is […]

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“Let’s Get Back to the Party” Explores the Joys & Tensions of Queer Friendships

Queer friendships, in art as in life, are often complex. Zak Salih’s debut novel Let’s Get Back to the Party powerfully and broadly explores these friendships—the joys and tensions that exist within them, and the lines between platonic and romantic that can blur to the point of disappearance—celebrating the ways in which they help define us. Shortly after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Sebastian Mote, a high school art history teacher, runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding. In the decades since they last saw each other, Sebastian has faded from Oscar’s memory, while Oscar still occupies […]

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Meet the woman who cared for hundreds of gay men dying of AIDS when no one else would

Ruth Coker Burks never intended to be an advocate, activist or even an angel. She just wanted to do the right thing. “Oh, I’m no angel,” Coker Burks, 62, told TODAY. “I’m just a person.” But that’s how her legacy has been defined when one fateful day in 1986, at just 26 years old, she was visiting a friend, Bonnie, at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been suffering from oral cancer. Bonnie had her tongue removed, and Coker Burks was her interpreter. This was their fifth extended hospital stay, but this time there was something different. […]

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