by Michelle Tea ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2018
An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays.
A collection of essays that defies genre and gender.
In her latest work of nonfiction, Tea (Modern Tarot: Connecting with your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards, 2017, etc.) collects her thoughts about queerness, femininity and feminisms, and gender identity. As the title indicates, this book is not a traditional iteration of the author’s intellectual history. Rather, Tea includes texts she has performed at conferences, readings, and ad hoc events as well as essays previously published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, xoJane, and other venues. Her tone is often unapologetic and abrasive; as a result, she is highly effective in communicating the difficulties and wonders of queer communities. In the most compelling essay, “How to Not Be a Queer Douchebag,” the author writes, “we are the rest of the world, we’re not so different, so let’s lighten up, but I also believe, really believe, that we’re special. We occupy a special place in our cultures, we always have and we still do. I think we have a greater opportunity to transcend bullshit and be generous people, I think we have a greater awareness and that this can bring about transformation on all levels of our lives and culture.” Tea’s authentic voice, infused with punk aesthetics, creates a literary environment that magnetizes and keeps readers spellbound to her line of inquiry. Later, she writes, “we broke, female queers may be called upon to protect ourselves at any minute, and the safety of numbers were always more effective than a pocket book.” The fine balance between idealism and realism makes this text echo with powerful conviction. With a textual presence evocative of Kathy Acker, Tea continues to lead the conversation in queer studies, though her approach is by telling the stories she knows are true: her own.
An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936932-18-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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