GLR January-February 2026

the prints of a hundred thousand/ strangers in my hands.” If Elaine Sexton’s work is understated and circumspect with respect to personal revelation, the poems in Liza Flum’s Hover are the polar opposite. Indeed, they announce and summarize their subject matter even in their titles, such as “Cradle song for a frozen embryo” and “Portrait of the chosen family with lines from a living will, a hospital visitation authorization, and a health care proxy,” to name just two. Themes of the book could hardly be more explicitly au courant , ranging from polyamory to marriage equality to in vitro fertilization. Yet, while they are smart and consciously crafted, Flum’s lines can sometimes seem a bit graceless or even crass: “we are trying for a baby by injecting your ass with hor mones.” To be fair, Flum is playing an entirely different poetic game from Sexton, and Flum’s best poems have an unmistakable power. In a passage from the poem “Memorial to a marriage,” Flum writes persuasively: “Didn’t Whitman say queers should stand on the shoreline calling, ‘I was, I am’ to journeyers from the future, as they sail past us in paper boats? I will: I do.” _________________________________________________________________ Dale Boyer is the author of Columbus in the New World .

for their apparent simplicity. The titles of some of her volumes ( Causeway , Prospect/ Refuge , andnow Site Specific ) hint at how she often uses land scape to explore personal themes: a causeway is a narrow strip of land that forms a bridge between two things (or, by implica tion, between people), and a site-specific work of art is a piece created for a specific place and time (again, a neat little metaphor for poetry and art in general). Her poems often pro ceed innocently enough, then take an unexpected turn, as in “All Night the Screen Door Slept,” which ends: “Who bothers/ lock ing a door one can see through?/ The past and its lies.” Here, the abrupt turn reveals that there’s a great deal more hidden within the house than would at first appear. Similarly, a poem that seems innocuous initially, “Building a Nest,” which on the surface is about a woman assembling a dress pattern, ends with the line: “your lips pursed like my mother’s, full of pins.” That ending phrase appears to indicate a less-than-ideal relationship between the poet and her mother. Sexton seems to have reached the peak of her powers from the poems in Causeway (2008) to the present. She can be witty, funny, and profound, as in her poem “Turnstile,” which finds a shared grief even in reflecting upon a common gateway: “I carry

won’t refrain from including everything in a portrait that he can see in a sitter’s face, even though it might prove troubling for the sitter. It’s all nonjudgmental and objective observation on Don’s part, but it does estab lish a tension in every portrait session he does, given that his intent is never to please his sitter by somehow “retouching” them, and that he’ll be showing them their portrait immediately after its completion to have them sign it. This extends even to the many celebrities who have sat for him over the years. And, yes, those “last drawings” he made of Christopher Isherwood are espe cially raw in their honesty. CF: At the beginning of chapter ten, Don refers to the “inevitability” of him and Chris finding each other. Can you say more about that? MS: Isherwood described their meeting as having “the strange sense of a fated, mutual discovery,” and Don likewise believes their coming together was somehow predestined. That their unlikely romantic partnership not only survived but thrived both domestically and co-creatively over three decades—and in spite of the thirty-year age difference—is perhaps evidence of their intertwined des tinies as “soulmates.” And it’s remarkable to consider that even forty years after Isher wood’s death, their relationship is still fuel ing Don. It’s an incredibly moving story that will restore any cynic’s faith in the en during power of love. Chris Freeman is the co-editor (with James Berg) of several books on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood.

traiture and, in particular, to working only from life. He’s been insatiable in his pursuit of portraying the tremendous variety of hu manity, drawing and painting people of di verse racial, gender, sexual, and generational identities—so much so that, to date, he’s created a staggering 15,000 por traits of people from all walks of life. The occasional famous face in the mix has been a professional necessity, as he explains, be cause how can any casual observer of his work know that he can truly get a good like ness if they can’t instantly recognize some of his subjects? But no matter how famous the faces are, his portraits are uncanny, not only for how accurately they capture a sub ject’s physical likeness, but also a palpable sense of that person’s personality, of their energetic presence. Don believes that that quality of animation can only be achieved from working with a live sitter and complet ing a portrait in a single intensive session. CF: My experience of sitting for Don, which I have done many times, is that he re sists looking at you when you show up. He basically stares at the floor, I believe to stop himself from beginning to work. He is that obsessed with spontaneity and painting from life, in the moment. Do you think that’s an accurate description of his process? MS: That’s been my experience as well. His work is fueled by a sense of spontaneity and immediacy, of capturing the encounter with a living subject right there in the energy of the moment shared between artist and sitter. It’s why Don refuses to work from photo graphs of his subjects because that would remove him from the excitement of looking

intently and closely at the real three-dimen sional person, and of tapping into the en ergy of their interaction in real time. CF: “Life” and “live” are central to Bachardy, as is his self-described “ruthless ness,” which comes across in some of his conversations with you about working with Bette Davis, for example. He seems defined by notions of confrontation, and sometimes there is almost an adversarial dynamic, es pecially in the last drawings of Chris, dur ing the final stages of his illness in early 1986. What can you say about that, and do you agree with my characterization? MS: I do. It could be argued that this harkens back to Don’s formative years as a fervent movie fan. He speaks of becoming enraptured as a young boy by the giant closeups of faces he saw on movie screens, and then of daringly sneaking into Holly wood movie premieres as a teenager (usu ally with his older brother Ted) to get even closer to the movie stars he revered. But it wasn’t satisfying enough for him just to see those people in the flesh. He was also com pelled to confront them, and to capture those encounters in a snapshot and an auto graph. It all seems a progression to the way he has since orchestrated his portrait sit tings, in that he seeks to record his human subject during one live encounter—and af terwards he even asks his sitter to autograph their portrait. For Don, his sitter’s signature is essential proof both of their collaboration and that the portrait was created from life. But since the very beginning of his pro fessional career, Don has also committed himself to absolute truth in his work. He

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