Jeffrey Round, Author at PinkPlayMags

Pieces of My Self: Fragments of an Autobiography by Keith Garebian

Jeffrey Round — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 21:26:50 +0000

In Pieces of My Self, subtitled Fragments of an Autobiography, author Keith Garebian grapples movingly and intelligently with issues of identity, theatre, cancel culture, Shakespeare (a great love), poetry, his fellow thespians (quite a number of them, both large and not-so-large in stature), his long-unresolved issues with his father (a man he couldn’t help wanting to thwart), and his various careers as a teacher, poet and, arguably, one of Canada’s greatest theatre critics. Nor does he hold back on airing his many peeves, a trait he claims to have admired in early mentors such as VS Naipaul.

As a poet, critic, teacher, actor and cancer survivor, Garebian has spent more than half a century helping carve out Canada’s identity, particularly in theatre, while also carving out an identity for himself. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian and Armenian parents in 1943, Garebian moved to Montreal in 1961, one month before his eighteenth birthday, when his family chose Canada as a second home in the hopes it would offer them better financial prospects.

His second home was not entirely the promised land it was heralded to be, bringing with it the harsh reality of racism, among other things, but the choice also provided him a lifetime of successes, mixed with frustration on one hand and endless fodder for his poetry, opinions and criticism on the other. (His many poetry awards attest to this, and his recent biography of William Hutt is something of a masterpiece.) As Oscar Wilde said of second marriages, they are “the triumph of hope over experience.” Garebian might well agree with that assessment as it applies to his second home.

While it’s impossible to tie up Garebian’s life neatly in any box, it can be said that his has been a life well lived and well felt, both by himself and those he has influenced in his many capacities. Pieces of My Self is a must-read for fans of identity, acting, Shakespeare, poetry, criticism and Canadian culture in general.

Available from Guernica Editions.

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary, theatre, and dance critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Scarborough Arts Council Poetry Award (2010), the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000, 2008 and 2013), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), the Lakeshore Arts/Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003), and an Ontario Poetry Society Award for Haiku (2003). He is the author of 7 collections of poetry.

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Urchin is a bold and visionary tale that breaks as many rules as it follows

Jeffrey Round — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 14:16:48 +0000

The 2022 Governor General’s Awards nominated novel, Urchin, seamlessly blends fantasy with history, and fiction with fact. Within this Young Adult coming-of-age tale, Kate Story has succeeded in the enviable task of writing a book that is impossible to define—impossible because it is bold and visionary, and breaks as many rules as it follows.

The story opens and closes in New York City with the ravages of the Spanish influenza in the days following World War I. But it barely touches down there, serving only to update us on the eventual fate of the hero/ine of the remarkable tale that unfolds in the chapters between prologue and epilogue.

That story begins seventeen years earlier in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where thirteen-year-old Dor(thea) is concerned about the strange goings-on in her family home. Built by her great-great-grandfather not long after his arrival in the new world, the house is said to lie on a gateway to the land of the Little Strangers—a.k.a. fairies—who do not take kindly to the intrusion. In Story’s hands, the house itself takes on a character and comes alive with its endless sighings and shiftings.

But all that is swept aside, at least momentarily, when a man named Guglielmo Marconi arrives in Newfoundland to conduct a transatlantic experiment in wireless sound transmission that will soon revolutionize communication. Dor swaps her identity for that of newspaper boy Jack, to become Marconi’s errand boy. Before long, however, Dor/Jack is concerned that Marconi’s experiment may invite further trouble with the fairies, who have kidnapped her/his/their mother.

Written with a penchant for invented language that straddles beat poetry and old-time colloquialisms, the book is rife with invention, both in its prose and in the fantastical images it generates. Scenes out of HG Wells as much as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique vie for attention. The result is constantly disconcerting—in a good way. It’s as though time has swallowed its own tail, turning St. John’s into a sci-fi setting for a gender-bending tale of adventure that reads like a cross between Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf.

All of the characters come fully alive, from the plucky Dor/Jack, through her/his family and friends, the people of St. John’s, all the way down to Marconi himself, a dour man with not much penchant for the foibles and foolishness of the young. This is a compelling work, wonderful in its execution.

Urchin is available from Running the Goat Books and Broadsides.

Kate Story is a genderqueer writer and theatre artist from St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, currently living in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario. Previous books include Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore, This Insubstantial Pageant and YA fantasy duo Antilia. Ferry Back the Gifts, a collection of short speculative fiction, was published in 2022.

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Dave Brandstetter, Insurance Claims Investigator—the welcome return of an iconic gay literary hero

Jeffrey Round — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:20:13 +0000

More than fifty years after the publication of the first Dave Brandstetter book, Fadeout, and nearly twenty years after its author’s death, Joseph Hansen’s celebrated mystery series is being republished in an affordable format by Penguin Random House. This is great news, as the books had become hard to find or just got too expensive over the past decade.

Starting with Fadeout in 1970 and continuing on up to A Country of Old Men in 1991, Hansen produced twelve titles featuring his openly gay insurance claims investigator. Not your typical private eye, Brandstetter comes after you only if you file a claim for a suspicious death. Fadeout begins when a popular entertainer disappears and his family makes a death claim—only Dave doesn’t believe he’s really dead.

The books are remarkable for two things in particular: their precision in unfolding the mechanics of the mysteries and the casualness with which they present gay life, starting as long ago as the mid-1960s, when Fadeout was set. Hansen doesn’t ever apologize for or over-explain it—it just is. It’s one of the things that gives Brandstetter his moral credibility.

Nor does Hansen have qualms about letting Brandstetter age, unlike, say, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, noted as already being old after World War I and still going strong up until the 1970s. By contrast, Dave is in his 40s—lean and vital—in the early books, but in the later stories his mortality is showing. He rails against the indignities suffered in the course of his profession and the physical and emotional abuse he has experienced. Over the course of the series lovers come and go, his father dies, Dave changes companies and eventually retires—sort of. In other words, he’s real—like us—even if he isn’t.

For my taste, the earlier and later books are best. The middle titles tend to bloat with Hollywoodisms—unrealistic violence and preachiness. It’s as if Hansen had decided to write his own Die Hard series. The fifth book, Skinflick, features a religious zealot who steals hardcore pedophilia from an erotica bookstore (for his own use), all to make a point about religious hypocrisy rather than paint a realistic portrait of a bigot. (For starters, I find it hard to imagine such material being on open display, even in 1970s Los Angeles.) Similarly, the eighth book, The Little Dog Laughed, finds Dave embroiled in a Latin American coup. He all but puts on a cape to fight vice.

Hansen’s prose runs from smooth to overblown. At his best he was an adept poet, creating vivid atmospherics while giving a sense of the moral decay of contemporary California. On the downside, he had a tendency to over-describe Brandstetter’s surroundings in a way that accurately rendered physical detail but without breathing life into the prose. Nevertheless, in his later books he mastered and got beyond that. As a writer, he always seemed to be trying to do better.

An all-too-frequent weakness in Hansen’s plotting was his tendency to rely on coincidence—things happen easily for Dave. Minor characters are far too talkative when he comes calling: “Oh, sure—you want to know everything about my missing roommate? Come in and eat a quinoa salad with me while I spill the beans,” etc. (In the film industry, these are called “California scenes”—for obvious reasons.) As well, he didn’t always wrap up secondary plots. In the tenth book, Obedience, the mystery starts with a marina full of angry boat people facing eviction, but they are nowhere to be found once the killer is unmasked. It’s as if he doesn’t care about them past their use in helping Dave solve the crime.

Despite these qualms, at their best the mysteries are top-notch. Dave’s moral universe is always admirable and Hansen’s treatment of gay life exemplary. Many have said there were no positive gay role models in fiction in the 1970s. These books put the lie to that notion. In the years since their appearance, there has not been a more compelling series in gay literature. And that’s why I’m an unabashed fan of both Dave Brandstetter and his creator, Joseph Hansen.

Joseph Hansen was a renowned short-story writer and the author of more than twenty-five novels, including the Dave Brandstetter series. In 1992 he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery for A Country of Old Men.

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Jim Nason’s “Self-Portait Embracing a Fabulous Beast” is like taking a masterclass in poetics

Jeffrey Round — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 14:44:33 +0000

Reading Jim Nason’s latest poetry collection, Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast, is like taking a masterclass in poetics. The economy and precision of words show effortlessly what makes a poem works. The subjects are noteworthy as well, ranging from ephemeral emotions through carnal sex to portraits of artists whose work is embedded in our cultural roadmap.

The book is divided in four sections: This Tree is a Rabbit, Honey and Salt, Rilke’s Tree, and Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast. All but Rilke’s Tree, which is comprised of a single work, is a mini-collection on its own.

This Tree is a Rabbit takes us through the grind of daily life in a contemporary urban setting. Moonwalk Through January describes the drab reality of winter in the city, instantly recognizable to anyone who has endured the season, culminating with a snapping-down finality: “We’ve been through this month before.”.

Covid Homeless brings a starker reality to bear with a gut-wrenching lurch (“he died/with a glass pipe in his hand”), more visceral than any newspaper article or photo, taking us right down to the lifeless body lying on the ground and leaving us to wonder: Who is responsible? Did I do enough to help?

Honey and Salt is a bestiary of carnality, including a wraparound snake, crying fish, domesticated camel, and a spiteful parrot among others. In these war-tinged stanzas, the poet grapples with his appetite for love: “I was driven to snakes/by the venom of our fights”, he reveals in Wind Stormed in With the Rain. In the emotionally ambivalent “Hump Day”, he describes “handfeeding memory’s camel,” trading a landscape of snow for one of sand, sadness for a temporary kind of redemption.

The longer work, Rilke’s Tree, opens with an indelible window on time as the narrator/poet contemplates a book entitled You Must Change Your Life, which details the friendship between writer Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Auguste Rodin. The poem is further populated by Nijinsky and Rodin’s mistress, Camille Claudel, among others, hinting at the fabled milieu of early-20th century Paris.

Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast, inspired by a pencil drawing of the same name by Federico García-Lorca, describes the struggles each of us faces in coming to terms with the darker parts of our intimate selves, in so far as they are knowable. In Envy, the poet confesses how he covets the work of American writer Carl Phillips (“I wanted a line like that, just one”), while in the title poem his lust turns him into a creature with “prancing … hooves” and “fiery loins”.

The section concludes with the aptly titled Soul (a rewriting of Seoul), and the poet’s empathy with diver Greg Louganis, who achieved a special kind of notoriety when he bled at the Seoul Olympics and then failed to disclose his HIV status: “Which leap/loosens fear heavy as a dead man/slung over your back?”.

At times heavy but at others notably light-hearted, these are the works of a poet who has mastered his craft, his words lighting up the sky like a display of northern lights.

Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast is available from Frontenac House.

Jim Nason is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, a short story collection and three novels. He was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for both fiction and poetry. His poetry book Rooster, Dog, Crow was shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award.

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A Bard on Hercular – Felice Picano’s latest novel is a surprising and entertaining blend of science fiction and pop culture

Jeffrey Round — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:24:57 +0000

In “A Bard on Hercular“, a 23rd-century spaceman drifts through deep space at the mercy of an AI that keeps sedating him during troubled periods, only to finally awaken on the planet Hercular. Who is he? Where does he come from and where is he going? This is the start of Felice Picano’s new work of fiction, the final volume in a three-book-long adventure known as “City on a Star”, published over a quarter of a century in real time.

The opening scenes are in line with the sort of images—some haunting, others enlightening or amusing—that spring readily from the pages of this book. Picano engages readers on numerous fronts, whether it be straight-on adventure, society gossip, political shenanigans, sexual peccadillos, or other. Humour is a constant, as it always is with this author.

As we soon learn, the wandering spaceman is none other than Holt Ib’r Sanqq, AKA Prince Holt, the much sought-after refugee son of an illustrious, mega-wealthy family. As word spreads of Holt’s arrival on Hercular, the list of contenders for his betrothal grows and competition ramps up aggressively, including an offer to become the wife and future mother to the children of a claimant to the title of emperor—this despite Holt’s outwardly masculine appearance, now much altered by 23rd-century bio-medical engineering.

Along with Holt, much of the story focuses on Eisenstein Syzygy Kell, AKA Ice, protagonist of The Betrothal at Usk, second in the series. Now an intergalactic singing superstar, Ice is none other than the eponymous bard of the title, scheduled to perform on Hercular. Escaping a bombing and kidnapping attempt by cyber terrorists, he is whisked off to safer places by a gang of winged youngsters who come to his rescue. More fun follows.

Picano is on fire here, reimagining the universe from daily life through to warfare, with a surprising and entertaining blend of science fiction and pop culture. It’s not just technology he reinvents, but also the intricacies of social evolution, both human and non, that co-exist at times uneasily in highly codified and regimented societies on seeded-world projects, aka colonies. He achieves this handily, whether digging up inter-galactic feuds, revealing the reproductive secrets of royals or describing the nuances of body language—younger males greet by touching fingertips while the older ones clasp arms.

It takes a bit of adjusting to the unusual names and invented languages, not to mention species, but things settle in quickly as the adventure takes off and we follow the interplanetary power-mongering while at the same time learning intriguing secrets about the supposed physical makeup of the universe.

From its beginning with Dryland’s End and the fall of a corrupt matriarchal system at the galaxy’s centre, through The Betrothal at Usk, the tale now reaches its epic conclusion in A Bard on Hercular on planets at its outer reaches. In a career with many mountain peaks, Picano’s now complete trilogy should prove one of his crowning achievements. It’s a whirlwind of fun and whimsy on an uninhibited romp through the galaxy.

Available from REQUEERED TALES

Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards.

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Fear Itself – James K Moran’s short story collection of horror and sexuality, naming the thing that must not be named

Jeffrey Round — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:11:17 +0000

With Fear Itself, Canadian author James K Moran picks up where he left off after his promising horror debut novel, Town & Train. This new collection of stories is a special blend of horror, with a soupçon of fantasy and sci-fi, including nine stories in all, a ghost novelette, and story notes. Many pieces have a clear local Canadian setting and feature LGBTQI+ protagonists. While they generally do not meet tragic, pulpy ends, the characters do not make it out unscathed, either.

The collection opens with the appropriately named “Glimpses Through the Trees”, in which a young straight couple find themselves on the run from something they can glimpse fleetingly, but can’t really see. From there the chills grow.

There is a lot of interplay among differently gendered couples that plays into Moran’s take on sexuality and horror. And where there is sexuality, seduction is never far behind. In “James Harker Tries to Have the Talk”, a provocatively shape-shifting demon summoned through an incantation ceremony plays mind games to get the young protagonist to declare his sexual preference once and for all. And good luck to it.

Nor is Moran above a literary touch, as in “Crag Face”, with its sly nod to the beat generation, when a giant from another dimension wreaks havoc on the protagonist as he makes his way to a funeral. The story, almost an exorcism, serves as an homage to real-life school friends and acquaintances, as Moran explains in an author’s note. In fact, each of the stories is followed by the author’s thoughts on their making. While these are normally the sort of things kept in private diaries, it’s as though Moran is so enthusiastic about his work that he can’t resist sharing just a little more.

In “Squared Away”, a creature with a vendetta against the entire human race (and who doesn’t have one these days?) lives in a box in the basement of a wine-store chain outlet. As the protagonist explores the store’s nether regions, he recalls a series of unexplained disappearances that may in fact have a direct connection here.

It’s at this point that the reader may feel a twinge of sympathy for the chorus of demonic forces called into being, whether summoned through wormholes, incantations in a grimoire, or, in the highly amusing “Monitored”, a nursery monitor. In either case, it’s clear the non-demonic characters must face their share of blame for the dangers brought about by their insatiable curiosity.

These are fun and highly relatable stories — the sort you can see yourself in. All the better to freak yourself out with as the author tries to fathom the malevolence lurking in the darkest corners of our minds, always on the lookout for that spine-tingling something as we contemplate the unimaginable. Whether you are seeking the child in your adult or you are an adult seeking to revert to childhood, Moran’s infectious delight in the macabre and the purely inventive will have you taking this journey at his side.

Available from LETHE PRESS

With Fear Itself, readers will discover sea serpents among the roiling waters of the St. Lawrence River under a dilapidated international bridge; a misguided bi mage negotiating with a demon he accidentally summoned into his dorm; a baby monitor issuing the voice of an inter-dimensional dark god; a couple in Picton County fleeing an ancient entity they cannot see directly that demands a blood sacrifice; queer ghosts haunting a British nightclub; two salty old ranch hands outside Lethbridge, Alberta, betting on who is a better shot in what may be the apocalypse; a shape-changing huckster seducing apathetic suburbanites; a gay rare-collectibles hunter hunted by a being moving between the Internet, film, and fact; a cat-fished giant marauding the backroads of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry counties; a gay wine shop manager discovering more than a dusty Moscato lurking in the musty basement; and a pterodactyl loose downtown.

Table of Contents

“Glimpses Through the Trees”

“Monitored”

“James Harker Tries to Have the Talk”

“Squared Away”

“Crag Face”

“Living Under the Conditions”

“Burned”

“Sexster”

“Carl and Monty’s Prairie Wager”

“A Canadian Ghost in London”

Paperback, cover design by Inkspiral

Interior design by Ryan Vance

James K Moran’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Canadian, American and British publications including Burly Tales: Fairy Tales for the Hirsute and Hefty Gay Man, bywords.ca, Glitterwolf, Icarus, and On Spec. Moran’s articles and reviews have appeared via CBC Radio, Daily Xtra!, Plenitude, Rue Morgue and Strange Horizons. He founded the Little Workshop of Horrors, an Ottawa writers’ group that carves speculative and literary work into the shape it is meant to be. He also runs Queer Speculations, which workshops 2SLGBTQ+ or queer-themed stories from far and wide. He is findable at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca and @jkmoran on Twitter. He lives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation, now called Ottawa.

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Christopher DiRaddo’s, The Geography of Pluto – transformative Quebecois queer fiction at its best

Jeffrey Round — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 13:18:15 +0000

Originally published by Cormorant Books in 2014, Christopher DiRaddo’s The Geography of Pluto is an acclaimed slice-of-gay-life novel set in 1990s Montreal. It has now been republished by Véhicule Press, and there is plenty to recommend about it.

Will Ambrose is a geography teacher who comes out in his early twenties with the support of his lesbian gal-pal, Angie. Together, they explore the ins and outs of Montreal’s LGBTQ social scene. While sharing laughs and learning lessons along the way, Will struggles to forge an identity he is truly comfortable with. But that is easier said than done. Bewildered by his search for an elusive happiness that appears before him, mirage-like, he finds commitment difficult.

First-love woes are followed by second-love hopes and fear, as the sensitive Will soon finds himself lost in the bars and back rooms of gay life. He also has to adjust to his mother’s fight for mortality as she battles cancer. In so doing, Will needs all the transformative powers, symbolized by the planet Pluto and the Underworld it represents, in order to survive.

The tale unfolds simply and straightforwardly. The style is invisible, the best kind of style there is. It never gets in the way and never wavers in pursuit of its target, insinuating itself into the reader’s heart. The book is full of small gems of personal insight, lovingly crafted, the moments that, for good and bad, make up a life well-lived when looked back on in time.

There is something dishabille about Quebecois fiction, as writer Gabrielle Roy coined it with her famed 1945 novel, Bonheure d’occasion (second-hand happiness), yet one that never loses hope. In his own inimitable way, DiRaddo nails that quality.

Publisher’s Synopsis

Twenty-eight-year-old Will, a teacher living in Montreal, has spent the last few months recovering from a breakup with his first serious boyfriend, Max. He has resumed his search for companionship, but has he truly moved on? Will’s mother Katherine – one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who loves him unconditionally – is also in recovery, from a bout with colon cancer that haunts her body and mind with the possibility of relapse. Having experienced heartbreak, and fearful of tragedy, Will must come to terms with the rule of impermanence: to see past lost treasures and unwanted returns, to find hope and solace in the absolute certainty of change. In The Geography of Pluto, DiRaddo perfectly captures the ebb and flow of life through the insightful, exciting, and often playful story of a young man’s day-to-day struggle with uncertainty.

Author Bio

Christopher DiRaddo is a Canadian fiction writer, editor and producer living in Montreal.His first novel, The Geography of Pluto, was published by Cormorant Books in 2014. The book was named one of the Top 20 Bestselling LGBTQ modern classics of 2016 by Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop. DiRaddo is also the author of several short stories and essays that have appeared in Arsenal Pulp Press anthologies, including the collection First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology in 2007.[3]

DiRaddo is also the producer and host of the Violet Hour, a queer reading series that takes place in the off-hours of a strip club in Montreal’s gay village. In 2017, DiRaddo began to work as an associate producer for the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, where he created an LGBTQ series for the festival and, in 2018, the Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize, an annual award presented to an established Canadian LGBTQ writer in recognition of a body of work.

DiRaddo is also the current president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation

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Keith Garebian’s “Finger to Finger” poetry collection is an elegy to a lifetime of love

Jeffrey Round — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:18:26 +0000

Keith Garebian’s tenth poetry collection, Finger to Finger, may come as a surprise even to those of us who are used to his soul-baring, as evidenced in his finely wrought collection about ancestry, Poetry Is Blood, or his frank reflections on surviving cancer, Scan. I say surprise, because this may be his strongest and most personal collection yet.

In his tenth poetry collection, Keith Garebian writes with savage honesty about love and its discontents, art, travel, disease, and aging. The poems have revealing gestures and situations, all drawn from personal experience. Though pared down, they have edge, and their lyrical fluency, with striking turns of feeling and imagery, never obscure the poet’s beating heart and vulnerabilities.

In a world that has little time for such small acts of grace as poetry offers, this volume illumines the elusive facets of love. (“Stars overhang us in fond silver: / not cosmic tinsel but celestial / music for special ears.”) Divided in six sections, it outlines in flashes of brilliance five relationships that have marked his life, progressing from the first feelings of limerence (“…my love couldn’t afford / a perfect sapphire / on a teacher’s poverty”) through to the forgiveness that comes, if it comes at all, with age as it lies at death’s door. (“Having forgiven each other / for the chaos of our marriage, / I reached for her wrinkled hand …”)

The reflections are deep and often startling. Beginning with his first wife and mother of a son born prematurely (“Michael / could not take a nipple, / Caryl’s scant milk drying. / What leaked from her instead / was love and grief”), it goes on to outline three more heterosexual relationships in the poet’s life: Joan, “actress, divorced, flamboyant”, “Blonde, blue-eyed Marla”, and finally Judith who, “like me, was divorced, / clear-eyed, pragmatic”, and who gardened until “I saw the tangled / roots within her.”

It is with the fifth section, however, that an abrupt transition to same-sex relationships occurs. (“You were supposed to be / a one-time thing. / When did you become / my first male love?“) This revelation leads to the poet’s reawakening to life, like Dante, who “went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood.” Here he is free to imagine and reinvent his lover as “a capering clown” or “as a geisha / hair lacquered gleaming black, / sharp-toothed abalone comb in place…” while “being beautiful / and brutal, tender and cutting, / Various things true at once…”

Each poem packs an emotional punch, whether it be in the poet’s searching for forgiveness (“I write / hoping to forgive myself / for so often preferring books above / humans, their panoply / of insincerity, their cruelty…”) or seeking closure in a relationship through an act as small as one finger reaching out to touch another (“…trying to do one, just one / last good thing, in a moment / of making, and unmaking.”)

With such acts, the poet becomes his own Virgil, guiding himself through the lower depths all the way to some semblance of Paradise in the book’s final section, which blossoms into what may be his richest relationship of all—his love for life and the world at large: “We are, each of us, / the ocean in a beached shell, / yearning for the song of ourselves…” Here, at last, there is no more searching, only “Intimacy enlarged / this humanness—”

This welcome volume is an elegy to a lifetime of love, spent or misspent, looking back over the road where it lies, tattered and bleeding, and sometimes, in small gestures or moments, where it triumphs. In its honesty and searing intimacy, it ranks Garebian among our finest poets of this or any generation.

Available from Frontenac House

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are being shortlisted for the Freefall Magazine Poetry Award and the Gwendolyn MacEwen-Exile Poetry Award in 2015, and the GritLit Poetry Award in 2016. He won the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003).

Keith is the author author of 29 books (ten of poetry), and and two chapbooks to date. He has been a juror for for both the Gerald Lampert and Raymond Souster Awards for the League. Some of his poetry has been translated into French, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, and Bulgarian.

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Spain at the Crossroads — The Book of Casey Adair by Ken Harvey

Jeffrey Round — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 13:06:23 +0000

In the late-1930s, writers as diverse in their outlook as George Orwell, Emma Goldman and Ernest Hemingway flocked to Spain in search of writing material. They quickly found it, as the country was in the midst of a civil war. Sometimes, however, writers find themselves unintentionally wrapped up in real-life events as intoxicating as any account, fictional or otherwise, that they might create.

The Book of Casey Adair is Ken Harvey’s fictional rendering of post-Franco Spain in the early 1980s. His protagonist, the young theatre student Casey Adair, has arrived there from the US, only to find himself in the midst of an attempted coup and his campus a hotbed of student activism.

The book is crowded with eager and excitable young characters, including Adair’s lovers and fellow students. Harvey brings out Adair’s naiveté as he struggles to fit in, both as an actor and as an activist. The tension ratchets up as he finds himself facing conflicting loyalties with friends and colleagues and his own desires as a young gay man coming to terms with his sexuality.

Told through letters by Adair, his friends and mentors, as well as a writer of political tracts, each voice is distinct and convincing. This epistolary account of those times rings true in so many ways that the framework of letters will leave you wondering just how much—or how little—has been fictionalized.

While the outward events of the time turned out to be only a pale reminder of the civil war, Harvey nicely counterpoints the external drama with Casey’s exploration of his sexuality and the additional drama of having it sideswiped by the newly arrived AIDS virus. If you were there, you will remember.

This is quite simply a marvelous book. The spirit of Spain at a pivotal moment in its history shines through on every page, as does the LGBTQ community’s dawning awareness of the grave crisis it is about to face. Read it and weep for what it tells us about the passing of time and all we have lost.

Available from University of Wisconsin Press

The post Spain at the Crossroads — The Book of Casey Adair by Ken Harvey appeared first on PinkPlayMags.

Felice Picano’s new-found “Songs and Poems”

Jeffrey Round — Thu, 19 May 2022 12:35:26 +0000

In a career spanning nearly half a century, embracing memoirs, literary fiction, sci-fi and thrillers alike, it’s odd that Felice Picano’s oeuvre has boasted only one full poetry collection—until now. It may be even odder that but for an act of serendipity this belated second volume might never have happened.

His first collection, The Deformity Lover and Other Poems, was published in 1978. It seemed to promise more to come in the same vein. When that didn’t happen, however, we were able to turn in time to his literary novels, like Onyx and Like People in History, for the extended pleasure they offer. Still, there was a sense that something was missing or at least put on hold.

That something was spurred into action recently by the long-overdue reappearance of two files, returned to him by a friend living in Spain, after decades during which Picano had thought them lost. This collection is divided between early pieces composed before The Deformity Lover, and later pieces written afterward, the seeming simplicity of the first offset by the complexity of the second.

This is a place where whimsy and profundity are not afraid to rub shoulders with one another. Here we have the “Drambuie kisses/and Tupelo honey” of New Orleans Girls riding up against the weight of the unanswerable, in June 26, 2015: “Had he lived/Would we be celebrating/Our momentous today?/Or quietly, simply, be letting it go …?”

His Aubade gives us the fragility of post-coital love: “The late afternoon storm we ignored/Has fled back to the ocean…” while My Mother’s Life tells us of a woman whose “life [is] doled out in dinners/lunches, breakfasts.”

A facility for classical form reveals itself in Hillyard’s Complaynt to His Model: A Sonnet (inspired by the Elizabethan painter Nicolas Hilliard, rumoured to have slept with Christopher Marlowe): “I think that Nature’s folk do all conspire/To blind me quite, that you may beam more bright.”

The earlier section is rounded out by a moving elegy, In Memoriam: Wystan Hugh Auden, 1973, written on learning unexpectedly of the death of his friend and mentor while out shopping: “How can you hear an era end/in the whoosh of a push-pad/supermarket door?”

Star spangled with joys and regrets and the patina of memory enjoyed a second time around, these are intimate glimpses from the lifetime of one writer who for years has been dedicated to telling us who we are and how we got here. It is a triumph, a small joy salvaged from the scrap heap of time.

Available from cyberwit.net

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