GLR January-February 2026

her committed partner for the next seventeen years. Things were looking up in her literary life as well. She published her first poem in a national literary magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature. Although her literary mentor, the writer and literary critic Alfred Kreymborg, told her that her work showed “a streak of genius,” she had yet to achieve her goal of supporting herself as a poet. Kreymborg paved the way for Swenson to win a residency at the prestigious Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. There she met poet Elizabeth Bishop and began a friendship that endured for thirty years. Swenson’s first book of poems, Another Animal , came out in 1954, when she was 41, and was later named one of twelve finalists for the National Book Award. She didn’t receive the award, but other successes followed, including a travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Guggenheim Foundation, and pub lication in The New Yorker . “Life shines in the heaving strain ing muscular waves of the never-subsiding sea,” she confided to her diary. Now in the literary whirlwind, Swenson met other poets and writers of distinction, including John Ciardi, James Broughton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Josephine Miles, Edward Field, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, whose gay novel Giovanni’s Room she deemed “an embarrassingly bad book,” though she admired how he had “disclosed himself in it.” During the academic year 1966-’67, she was writer-in-resi dence at Purdue University, a position that provided not only something new to spark her creativity but also needed distance

from Pearl as their relationship was breaking down. Life in In diana was “Squaresville.” Gossip was the sport there, she said, “second only to football.” But it was also at Purdue that she met Rozanne (“Zan”) Knudson, who would become her final part ner and ultimately her literary executor. At the end of the aca demic year, she and Zan moved to Sea Cliff, a village on the north shore of Long Island, which became Swenson’s final home. For the next several years, Swenson’s life consisted of giv ing readings, teaching, judging contests, writing poems, and, writes Brucia, “trying to navigate life with boundlessly ener getic Zan.” In 1970, she was invited to read at the Library of Congress and was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. “Why am I there?” she wrote in her diary. “If dis tinction comes, can extinction be far behind?” Brucia devotes only a handful of pages to the final fifteen years of Swenson’s life. During those years, there were both lit erary triumphs, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and personal losses such as the death of her beloved friend and correspondent, Elizabeth Bishop, and her own struggles with deteriorating health and old age. “Her life is one of the most as tonishing and inspiring stories in American letters,” write Crum bley and Hoak. Brucia’s biography does a creditable job of supporting this claim. Strong on Swenson’s relationships, skimpy on a discussion of the actual work, The Key to Every thing is a fine introduction to this poet who, as Brucia puts it, “never hesitated to prod any aspect of life.”

Art as Activism in the Plague Years

I F EVER WE NEEDED a reminder of just how resilient, resourceful, cre ative, and ingenious the queer com munity can be during a crisis, it’s now. Curated and published by the private Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in Brazil in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough is a tribute to and compilation of the works of Gran Fury, the artistic collec

simple but jarring slogan “ SILENCE = DEATH .” The use of the triangle was typical of Gran Fury’s postmodern style, which was to take recognizable symbols and re purpose and invert them. The pink triangle had to be worn by queer people detained by Nazis during the Third Reich. The artists of Gran Fury turned the symbol upside down and made it about resistance and empow erment. The SILENCE = DEATH poster pre

M ATTHEW H AYS

GRANFURY Art Is Not Enough Edited by Adriano Pedrosa and André Mesquita MASP/KMEC. 207 pages, $39.95

tive that was formed in the 1980s adjacent to the activist group ACT UP. Given that the United States’ current regime is expo nentially worse than the Reagan Administration, the timing of this book’s arrival couldn’t be better. For the uninitiated, Gran Fury came into being soon after ACT UP was founded in 1987. In his chapter “Art is Not Enough,” curator and co-author André Mesquita analyzes the development and creation of some key Gran Fury works. The collective’s name, he explains, came from the type of cop car the New York police preferred at the time. One of the first im ages Gran Fury plastered around New York City was among their most indelible: It features an inverted pink triangle and the Matthew Hays, co-editor (with Tom Waugh) of the Queer Film Clas sics book series, teaches film studies at Marianopolis College and Con cordia University. 34

dated the actual formation of ACT UP and undoubtedly helped further the sense of urgency that necessitated its founding. There was more repurposing with the READ MY LIPS poster. This featured two men in sailor garb engaging in a deep kiss. The “Read my lips” slogan was lifted from the campaign of President George H. W. Bush, who stated it repeatedly before promising he would enact “no new taxes” (a promise he later broke). Another unforgettable image is that of three couples (two men, two women, and a male-female couple) locking lips beneath the words “ KISSING DOESN ’ TKILL : GREED AND INDIFFER ENCE DO .” The image was a brilliant response to corporate and government apathy in the face of the burgeoning pandemic and reassured viewers that casual contact (like kissing) was not a means of HIV transmission. In another campaign, the collective published “The New York Crimes,” a New York Times parody in which news stories

TheG & LR