GLR January-February 2023

on the fact that she had taught Anne Frank in Amsterdam dur ing the war. Besides the fact that she profited financially from the trip and often denied being Jewish during the stay, she chose to shock audiences by describing Frank unfavorably, calling her “unremarkable” and “of average intelligence.” Geerlings ac knowledges that a partial motive for this cruelty may have been Pool’s belief that there’s nothing noble about suffering in si lence, but also surmises that her personal motivation was envy at the posthumous attention Anne Frank was receiving. A similarly unflattering picture emerges when Geerlings de scribes the often patronizing and proprietary treatment of the Black writers that Pool included in a 1965 anthology, linking it to the exploitative behavior of white patrons in the Harlem Renais sance. Again, she leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Geerlings’ accounts of the two U.S. trips following the Anne Frank visit also cast her subject in an unappealing light. In 1963, Pool secured a position teaching creative writing at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, again under false pretenses. Although she had only been trained as an elementary school teacher, her CV presented a confusing mixture of two fictional degrees and

references to friendships with prominent Black intellectuals. While these misrepresentation seems to have worked, Geerlings observes of the appointment that Pool “was still a white person in front of a (predominantly) Black class, and there was no ev idence that Pool collaborated with Black faculty members in her classes.” Clearly, Rosey Pool’s political analysis was deeply flawed, a fact that’s revealed but not interrogated throughout this biog raphy. Similarly, while certain aspects of her professed mission may have been laudable and originally well-meaning, by the end of the volume her dubious outcomes and unsavory personal traits have overshadowed her altruistic projects. In this respect, Geerlings’ sympathetic treatment of her subject seems strangely out of place. He provides ample evidence of Pool’s failings but ultimately withholds judgment, possibly a nod to academic norms (this book started as a doctoral dissertation). Readers, however, are not constrained by the need for scholarly circum spection. While this problematic book does shed light on certain historical alliances and particulars, the general reader may be wise to seek this information elsewhere.

nize the basic question: “Hugs are too/ Ambiguous/ How long to continue to hold?/ When to let go?/ How warmly press?/ How much suppress?/ Hugs are contact/ With ridiculous tact.” Some of the poems address the ways in which gay poets interact with the larger his tory of gay poetics, as in “Attempting to Get Through to Housman.” A number of them focus on relationships between older and younger adult men, which he handles in a way that is both sensitive and practical. The sheer utility of an older gay man, knowledgeable in the ways of the world, helping to acculturate an intelligent, attrac tive young man is acknowledged and dis cussed from the perspective of a poet whose life experience has spanned many decades. A LAN C ONTRERAS BRONCO Album by Orville Peck Columbia Records and Sub Pop Thirty-four-year-old Orville Peck is a country star whose love of the pedal steel

and a well-worn Western sound is shaking the foundations of country music. Peck told Out magazine (July 2022): “If you watch the classic old Westerns, there’s pretty heavy-handed homoeroticism put into it. A lot of those Italian directors had some sugar in their tank, if you know what I’m saying.” Proud of the sugar in his tank, Peck withholds a lot about his up bringing in South Africa, and he wears a Zorro-like mask on his face at all times. The follow-up to his 2019 debut, Pony , is another equine title, Bronco , and he’s still crooning about bad boyfriends and broken relationships. In the country tradition, Peck feels a strong attachment to place, and nearly half of the album’s song titles refer to a town, a city, or a just some turn-in-the-road (e.g. “Lafayette,” “Kalahari Down”). His debut, with track titles such as “Kansas (Remem ber Me Now)” and “Hexie Mountains” was no different. There are some campy jokes along the way. In “Queen of the Rodeo,” he croons: “Don’t be down girl, this world is a bummer.” He pos sesses a deep, Presley-like baritone, but his overall sound is somewhat derivative. For the tenth anniver sary of her Born This Way album, Lady Gaga recruited Peck to create a “country road” version of the title song. The last track on Bronco , a dazzling duet with bandmate Bria, is a reprise of the album’s first song (“Daytona Sand”). With the release of his second album, it becomes less and less clear why he persists in wearing a disguise. C OLIN C ARMAN

Barnard, Will’s lust for Dolly grows, while Dolly strings her along in an erotic, if fre quently transactional, relationship. This leads Will to engage in subversive and criminal acts. They both fear that their rela tionship will be discovered by their friends and family. When the threat becomes a real ity, they devise an intricate plan to kidnap a child for ransom that would give them the money to start over in another country. They become inextricably bound by crime and passion. Jazzed holds closely to the actual events, except for location, with well-re searched details of music, Harlem night clubs, and social issues like immigration and eugenics. For those who like historical fiction, true crime, and/or gender play, this novel has something to offer. Those who look for complex character development through interiority and motivation and the like may be disappointed. M ONICA C ARTER Jonathan Bracker has an expansive capac ity for falling in love. Now in his eighties, his background as a scholar of poetry and self-taught artist blends its way into this collection of cheerfully gay love poems, in which his imagery is deliciously physical without being crude. Many of the poems involve gentle touching and tender sensu ality, such as the many ways of appreciat ing a lover’s hair. There are also delightfully practical questions living in these poems. In the first part of “How I Sometimes Look At Hugs,” we all recog LOVE POEMS OF A GAY NERD by Jonathan Bracker Amazon. 84 pages, $3.58

Orville Peck. Photo by Sylvee.

January–February 2023

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