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This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.

The twenty-first century is already riddled with protests demanding social justice, and in every instance, young people are leading the charge. But in addition to protesters who take to the streets with handmade placards are young adults who engage in less obvious change-making tactics. In Speaking Truths, sociologist Valerie Chepp goes behind-the-scenes to uncover how spoken word poetry-and young people's participation in it-contributes to a broader understanding of contemporary social justice activism, including this generation's attention to the political importance of identity, well-being, and love.   Drawing upon detailed observations and in-depth interviews, Chepp tells the story of a diverse group of young adults from Washington, D.C. who use spoken word to create a more just and equitable world. Outlining the contours of this approach, she interrogates spoken word activism's emphasis on personal storytelling and \"truth,\" the strategic uses of aesthetics and emotions to politically engage across difference, and the significance of healing in sustainable movements for change. Weaving together their poetry and personally told stories, Chepp shows how poets tap into the beautiful, emotional, personal, and therapeutic features of spoken word to empathically connect with others, advance intersectional and systemic analyses of inequality, and make social justice messages relatable across a diverse public. By creating allies and forging connections based on friendship, professional commitments, lived experiences, emotions, artistic kinship, and political views, this activist approach is highly integrated into the everyday lives of its practitioners, online and face-to-face.   Chepp argues that spoken word activism is a product of, and a call to action against, the neoliberal era in which poets have come of age, characterized by widening structural inequalities and increasing economic and social vulnerability. She illustrates how this deeply personal and intimate activist approach borrows from, builds upon, and diverges from previous social movement paradigms. Spotlighting the complexity and mutual influence of modern-day activism and the world in which it unfolds, Speaking Truths contributes to our understanding of contemporary social change-making and how neoliberalism has shaped this political generation's experiences with social injustice.

2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALISTFinalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureEditors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

Black lesbian literary theorist, community curator and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers direction both in terms of how to recognise our mothers and how to take Audre Lorde seriously as a theorist. Through Gumbs, we come to recognise Lorde's concept of mothering as a paradigm through which to describe our relationship, when we are at our best, to each other as human beings, our relationship to ourselves, and perhaps our relationship to the living, breathing natural world through which we move, in essence our mother love relationship to our existence. Gill highlights and elaborates on this expansive theory of mothering but, more importantly, on the audacious commitment to approaching Audre Lorde as a theorist.

Tragic Bitches: An Experiment in Queer Xicana & Xicano Performance Poetry, by Adelina Anthony, Dino Foxx and Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, recovers a lost voice among current Chicano sociocultural trends, the Queer Xican@. This study analyzes the use of performance poetry as a tool for uncovering Queer Xicanidad. The trio establishes queer people of color via social demonstration, thus giving life through both live performance poetry and the written page. Brazen and unapologetic, Tragic Bitches serves as a social movement in and of itself in which the poets rescue Queer Xicanidad from oblivion. Its authors recognize and claim their collective tragedy while learning and healing from it.

Olga Bakich's biography of Valerii Pereleshin (1913-1992) follows the turbulent life and exquisite poetry of one of the most remarkable Russian émigrés of the twentieth century. Born in Irkutsk, Pereleshin lived for thirty years in China and for almost forty years in Brazil. Multilingual, he wrote poetry in Russian and in Portuguese and translated Chinese and Brazilian poetry into Russian and Russian and Chinese poetry into Portuguese. For many years he struggled to accept and express his own identity as a gay man within a frequently homophobic émigré community. His poems addressed his three homelands, his religious struggles, and his loves. InValerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, Bakich delves deep into Pereleshin's poems and letters to tell the rich life story of this underappreciated writer.

A giant of American letters, Walt Whitman is known both as a poet and, to a lesser extent, as a prophet of gay liberation. This revealing book recovers for today's reader a lost Whitman, delving into the original context and intentions of his poetry and prose. As Juan A. Herrero Brasas shows, Whitman saw himself as a founder of a new religion. Indeed, disciples gathered around him: the \"hot little prophets\" as they came to be called by early biographers. Whitman's religion revolved around his concept of comradeship, an original alternative to the type of competitive masculinity emerging in the wake of industrialization and nineteenth-century capitalism. Shedding new light on the life and original message of a poet who warned future generation of treating him as a literary figure, Herrero Brasas concludes that Whitman was a moral reformer and grand theorist akin to other grand theorists of his day.

Madeleine de l’Aubespine (1546–1596), the toast of courtly and literary circles in sixteenth-century Paris, penned beautiful love poems to famous women of her day. The well-connected daughter and wife of prominent French secretaries of state, l’Aubespine was celebrated by her male peers for her erotic lyricism and scathingly original voice. Rather than adopt the conventional self-effacement that defined female poets of the time, l’Aubespine’s speakers are sexual, dominant, and defiant; and her subjects are women who are able to manipulate, rebuke, and even humiliate men. Unavailable in English until now and only recently identified from scattered and sometimes misattributed sources, l’Aubespine’s poems and literary works are presented here in Anna Klosowska’s vibrant translation. This collection, which features one of the first French lesbian sonnets as well as reproductions of l’Aubespine’s poetic translations of Ovid and Ariosto, will be heralded by students and scholars in literature, history, and women’s studies as an important addition to the Renaissance canon.

For Vanita, the most productive framework for thinking about sex is to think of it as imbricated in speech, in play, in the idiom and conventions of the language with which one works, especially when one is a poet. Love and sex are play as much as they are work. Vanita suggests that we shed some of our anxieties and go where the sources take us, and that we have fun along the way because literature s not literature if it does not give pleasure.

A reflection on Federico Garcia Lorca's life, his haunting death, and the fame that reinvigorated the marvelous in the modern world \"A galaxy of critical insights into the cultural shock waves circling and crisscrossing Lorca's execution and his unknown resting place, there is not a single book on Lorca like this one.\"-Andres Zamora, Vanderbilt University There is something fundamentally unfinished about the life and work of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), and not simply because his life ended abruptly. Noel Valis reveals how this quality gives shape to the ways in which he has been continuously re-imagined since his death. Lorca's execution at the start of the Spanish Civil War was not only horrific but transformative, setting in motion many of the poet's afterlives. He is intimately tied to both an individual and a collective identity, as the people's poet, a gay icon, and fabled member of a dead poets' society. The specter of his violent death continues to haunt everything connected to Lorca, fueling the desire to fill in the gaps in the poet's biography.