lgbtq authors

Special Feature: A Cemetery Boys Found Poem

| Rebecca Valley

Healing

How long after he was gone would Yadriel be dreaming

The fullness of the family

they didn’t just take all pain

let people feel grief 

it was important 

to honor all those who make this community strong

“¡Mi querido!”

mourn 

loss of a loved one

Why

Growth isn’t a deviation 

growth is more 

a sphere instead of a line

This poem was created using quotes from the book and notes from our Drizzle Summer Book Club discussion on The Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas. It was written collaboratively by Ingrid Carabulea, Rey Katz, Tracy Vasquez, Sarena Brown, and Rebecca Valley. You can find the writer bios here. To learn more about the book that inspired the poem, check out our micro review.

Review: Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan

| Rebecca Valley

Fairest: A Memoir. By Meredith Talusan (Viking 2020)

Reviewed by P.A Huff

Autobiography is the most personal genre and the most generous. By definition it favors the up-close gaze. It is the fruit of self-absorption but also the turning of self-centeredness to purposes far beyond narcissism. Ancient writers, who rarely saw their reflection, spoke of the first-person narrative as a kind of mirror for the reader. For centuries, we have been entranced by the near magical link between someone else’s self-disclosure and our own self-empowerment. The Latin for looking glass, speculum, is related to a broad family of intriguing spin-offs such as speculation and introspection but also respect and, charmingly, even spice. Meredith Talusan’s memoir, well seasoned with sharp intelligence and rare powers of awareness, is a courageous gift of self that delivers keen insight into the mystery of visualizing who we are and who we long to be.

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Review: The Tradition by Jericho Brown

| Rebecca Valley

The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press 2019)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Kudlacz

…I am ashamed of America

And confounded by God….

It was these lines from the poem Foreday in the Morning in Jericho Brown’s third, Pulitzer Prize winning book The Tradition that captured the emotion I, as well as many other Americans, felt as we watched George Floyd die by asphyxiation when a police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while three other officers stood by.  Ashamed and confounded not just by this singular outrageous and gross injustice, but by the fact that this sanctioned atrocity, involving another black American male, is a pervasive and persistent malady. This powerful book is built upon a foundation of poems in which Brown repeatedly forces us to confront the issue of racism in this country and the grim, indeed fatal, consequences that so often accompany it.

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“Just Dandy:” A Review of I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going by Peter McGough

| Rebecca Valley

“Just Dandy: ” A Review of I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s by Peter McGough (Pantheon 2019)

Review by Michael Quinn

Peter McGough and his partner (in business and romance) David McDermott rose to prominence in the 1980s New York art scene. Their paintings have a vintage feel with a contemporary twist (a still life of flowers has the blossoms arranged into the shape of a dollar sign). Their later photography has a much more mysterious feeling, truer to whatever periods they were aping. Mentored by Julian Schnabel, their work appeared in three Whitney Biennials and graced a 1986 cover of Artforum.

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Review: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

| Rebecca Valley

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (Akashic: New York 2017)

Reviewed by Tracy Vasquez

Rivers Solomon’s science-fiction novel An Unkindness of Ghosts is masked in a pain.  The point of writing on the pain of others is to expose the reader to a point of view; in this instance, Solomon writes from the perspective of Aster, who identifies as gender fluid. Aster is searching for a consistent path in the uncertainty of the cosmos.  “She craved clarity, transparency and answers.” (169)  She longs for answers from her mother, who died when she was a baby; yet, a mapping of sorts leads her on a path set by her mother.  Cutting out the contrivances, we see Aster through her history of loss and survival on the vessel Matilda.

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Review: The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

| Rebecca Valley

The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper (bloomsbury 2020)

Reviewed by Madeleine Nowak

If I really wanted to do Phil Stamper’s debut YA novel The Gravity of Us justice, I’d pull out my phone and video myself live walking through the streets of New York City while I shared my thoughts with you. To review the book this way would be the best homage to Cal, the wonderful narrator Stamper has crafted, a social-media-savvy, budding seventeen year-old reporter from Brooklyn who suddenly finds himself transplanted to Clear Lake, Texas when his dad is picked as an astronaut candidate for NASA’s first mission to Mars. In Clear Lake, Cal is pulled away from everything he loves from Brooklyn, but unexpectedly brought closer to Leon, the son of another astronaut and the perfect love match for Cal.

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Review: Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy

| Rebecca Valley

Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy (Little, Brown, and Co., 2019)

Reviewed by Maayan D’Antonio

17-year-old Ari Helix is a refugee who has no impulse control. So when she sets off alarms she shouldn’t have on Heritage, a spaceship that belongs to the tyrannical Mercer Company, she and her brother Kay escape from the ship and hide on Old Earth, now a desolate planet. But when Ari pulls Excalibur from a gnarled tree, she unknowingly sets into motion a new cycle of the King Arthur legend. A cycle she doesn’t know has anything to do with her.

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Recommended Reading: Pride Month 2019

| Rebecca Valley

Queer literature isn’t just about representation. It’s about making room for fluidity, hybridity, experimentation, the complicated, difficult to define realities of the way we define ourselves, the ways we love, the ways we see and move through the world. This month, we celebrate LGBTQ+ authors — those we’ve covered in the past, and those we look forward to reading in the near future.

Favorites we recommend…

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Review: Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going by Jessica Jacobs

| Rebecca Valley

Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going by Jessica Jacobs (Four Way Books, 2019)

Reviewed by Risa Denenberg

To read Jessica Jacobs’ newest poetry collection, Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019) is to start out where she began in her first collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015; winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry) and left off in In Whatever Light Left to Us (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). Each book in this trilogy performs an aria of lesbian love and lesbian sexuality that earns its encore.

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