Even more LGBTQ poetry to get to know, Part III

Last but definitely not least, these selections from the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter appeared in November and December 2023. Enjoy! 

A Marriage at Ancestral Hall in Sun Village            by    Shelley Wong

East of Wyoming, I Remember Matthew Shepard    by Ruben Quesada

Corsair                                          by Cyrus Cassalls and Brian Turner

Funeral for Unreturned Ashes                             by Travis Chi Wing Lau

Winter Song                                                                by Wilfred Owen

Even more LGBTQ poetry to get to know, Part II

These selections from the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter appeared in October and November 2023. Enjoy!

Under the Spell of Conjunto                   by    Vickie Vértiz

An Erasure of Senate Bill 1698 (2)         by Moncho Alvarado

The Opposite of Abandonment               by Alexis Aceves Garcia

Cold War                                                 by    Russell Mann

*I loved this one!

Frog                                                          by    Flower Conroy

The Miracle of Giving                             by    D.A. Powell

Even more LGBTQ poetry to get to know, Part I

I hadn't realized just how long it's been (four months!) since I last posted a compilation of LGBTQ-themed poems (not all by LGBTQ poets, I should note) from the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. So I'm playing catchup on that, in this and the next two postings. These poems were disseminated in September and October 2023. Enjoy!

Places                                        by         Willyce Kim    

Breath for Metal                        by         Ching-in Chen

Ode to People Who Hate Me    by        Carmen Giménez

Decolonialish Self-Portrait        by        Sara Borjas

You, Emblazoned                      by        Cass Donish

She Passed This Way                by        Djuna Barnes

Gilded epigrams galore!

For about a decade now, our merry band has periodically discussed non-LGBTQ literature, a practice we've institutionalized as "Fifth Wednesday" discussions. To maintain the distinction from our bread and butter, I haven't been logging those books in our running list of "Books We Have Read" (at the bottom of the homepage), and have not blogged about them here, either. But I'm going to make an exception to the latter practice for the most recent example of the genre we've discussed: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

It turns out that the novel wasn't just a collaboration between Twain and Warner. Writing on the Polyglot Vegetarian blog 15 years ago, MMcM (yes, that's his handle) says this:  

There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings. Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.

If that intrigues you as much as it does me, I commend the entire posting to you--and the novel, too.  The five of us who discussed it last month (full disclosure: Yours truly picked it) all saw it as a mixed bag.  Though largely bound by the conventions of 19th-century potboilers, including lots of coincidences and a mad dash to tie up the many loose ends in the final chapters, the book effectively uses humor to break through those norms.

Vanity Fair's Top 20 books of 2023

'Tis the season for the making of "Best books of the year" lists! (Scroll down for posts featuring lists from the New York Times and Washington Post.) Now it's the turn of Vanity Fair to share its "20 Best Books to Read in 2023," a category that contains four LGBTQ titles: The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz; Biography of X by Catherine Lacey; Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas; and the seemingly ubiquitous Blackouts by Justin Torres, which has landed on just about every list of great 2023 books. Enjoy!

Today in gay literary history...

In today's installment of Michael Dirda's weekly column for Book World in the Washington Post, he cites 14 books that aren't bestsellers but are worth reading. One of them is the handwritten manuscript of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, available from Editions des Saints Peres (but not via Amazon), which we''ll be reading next year. The other, which is what mainly prompted me to post this item, is Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters. In his summary, Dirda name-checks several LGBQ connections on this day, Dec. 3:

"In 1950, James Agee was happily at work on the script for 'The African Queen'...and in 1958, the actor John Gielgud was busily cruising gay bars in San Francisco. Finally, on Dec. 3, 1967, the poet Thom Gunn wrote chattily to a friend about 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and a visit from the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who reminisced about how sexy and attractive W.H. Auden used to be.'