There are plenty of ghosts in New York City. And this PRIDE, we take a measure of what poets are...
All I’ve ever wanted to do was create and witness art that might save my life. And, thus far, it has. Art has pulled me back from the edge of myself more times than I can count. I’m sure that’s true for many of you as well, but, lately, it hasn’t been enough... Read More
Dear Eileen Myles, Your new tandem book Snowflake / different streets (Wave Books) feels so good in my hands. I like to...
He didn’t obfuscate with his sci-fi and fantasy stories–he was always detailing the complexities of the interior life of his characters within the context of a vivid cultural and physical landscape, regardless of where those characters were situated. And in his lush, lyrical descriptions the marginal became central. Read More
“I don’t trust beauty anymore / when will I stop believing it?” ...
Writers know that writing is complicated. Any written piece is a performance, a tightly condensed fragment of an idea. Every body of work is merely a thread of a broader story, a story so vastly complex that no alphanumerical symbol, no string of words, no structure of grammar or symbolic stroke could ever fully hold it. Read More
The Rhyming Dictionary, Leather Porn & Barbara Streisand’s “Evergreen”: My Week with Agha Shahid Ali
"...if we 've never heard Shahid’s name mentioned much in circles of gay literati, it's largely due to the fact that each passing month sees the release of more and more volumes of poetry, and possibly just as many anthologies, more and more of them written and compiled by out gay men. From this perspective, Shahid can get lost in the shuffle. But if you knew Shahid, or if you admire any of the work he left behind, you’ll know he can’t, he won’t be lost..." Read More
If you haven’t been living on a desert island for the past decade or two, you know that GLBT literature has been under a lot of stress to adapt to the new media environment. Many publishers that were the bastions of queer culture in the 1970s and 80s have gone out of business. What’s a queer writer to do? Read More
Yesterday morning, as the New York Times published their obituary of one of the world’s most beloved illustrators, Maurice Sendak, I watched...
Like everyone who has won–or lost–an award, I have mixed feelings about them. It’s good to be a nominee/finalist, great to be a winner, not so wonderful to lose, unsettling to be judged. Yet I like the principle of giving people recognition for the hard work that propels talent to the next place. Read More
