New poetry collection salutes leaders of Queer Movement
In her latest poetry collection, “American Queers,” out now from the local Cervana Barva Press, Boston-area poet Jesse Mavro Diamond salutes four leaders of the Queer Movement from the mid20th century, including Pat Parker, Richard Leitsch, Stormé DeLarverie, and Charley Shively. “Stormé had two royal superpowers,” one of which was “the ability against all the odds/ to be victorious in the end.” Diamond writes of a gay bar, where “carpenters, bankers, bricklayers, undertakers” gathered together. “Why gay bars?/ Because we could only be gay/ In gay bars.” The poems are playful and heartful, warmly wry in moments, and poignant, too: “o my sister/ your lines are the omitted lines.” Diamond shows us the beating hearts of figures who had lasting impact on the queer landscape.
Coming out
“The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” by Nicole Sealey
(Knopf )
“Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonara Carrington”
by Joanna Moorhead (Princeton)
“Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life” by Anna Funder
(Knopf )
Pick of the week
Jesse Hassinger of Odyssey Books in Hadley recommends “Dark Days: Fugitive Essays” by Roger Reeves (Graywolf ): “Roger Reeves’s astonishing use of language in his poetry comes through in this collection of essays which take a deep dive into the echoes from the dark days of slavery in the United States. Reeves never allows for easy answers. This is a heady and serious text that draws in Baldwin, Wright, Morrison, and Hurston but also Fred Moten and Achille Mbembe, T.S. Eliot and Solmaz Sharif. Overall this is a brilliant examination of how, why, and where-to this moment in time, with all its warring facets, has brought us.”