GLR May-June 2023

We’re escorted along a timeline that only the memoirist seems to understand. The signposts at the beginning of each chapter ground us in the various stages of the writer’s life. But with out much else in the way of a through-line, it’s easy to get lost. I believe the last chapter was meant to be an imagined en counter between Shakur and his long-dead father. Experimen tal prose can be effective in a memoir, but this incident happens so abruptly, with so little preparation, that’s it’s hard to be sure what’s going on. Shakur is undoubtedly a talented writer with a lot to say, but When They Tell You to Be Good ends up as little more than a collection of anecdotes strung together with vague ruminations on dead fathers, Caribbean immigrant culture, and queer alien ation. That’s not enough, but I’m sure that this writer will have more to say the next time around. ____________________________________________________ Cary Alan Johnson, a writer, activist, and Africanist, is the author of the novel Desire Lines (Querelle Press, 2022).

any age. Shakur succeeds boldly at the former but often loses the emotional connection. Descriptions of lovemaking are ster ile and pedestrian. One example: “We fondled each other’s bod ies. I took his cock in my mouth. I made him lose himself under my touch.” Shakur apparently loses his virginity in a threesome in Manila that’s recorded somehow on a cellphone. The possi bilities for storytelling here are endless, but Shakur simply states these odd circumstances without emotion or explanation. Does he find this feature of his first sexual encounter exciting? liber ating? shameful? The reader is left not knowing how to feel, be cause we’ve got no clue how Shakur feels. There are some moments of insight that will ring true for many readers, and they are told in well-constructed prose: “I’d learned to be proud to be queer, but the next battle was how to manifest desire moment by moment. Virginity felt like a threshold, a boundary that proved that I was a part of the wak ing world.” But there are also moments when people and events collide jaggedly with little explanation or rhythm.

B R I E F S chosen serious poets who write in a range of styles. However, his stated priority is illumi nating a reconfiguration of Irish identity that includes queer people: “We are not a foot note. We are not a box ticked.” T HOMAS K EITH

QUEERING THE GREEN Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry Edited by Paul Maddern The Lifeboat Press. 423 pages, £15.

INVISIBLE HISTORY The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski Edited by Philip Clark and Michael Bronski Library of Homosexual Congress, 280 pages, $34.95 The collections of poets lost to AIDS often read like the anthologies of the World War I poets: so many wonderful, talented voices cut down tragically before their prime. What might they have done if they had lived longer? Walta Borawski is a name I was not familiar with before, but after read ing this poignant collection, it’s a name I will not forget. Indeed, reading the entire output of someone who died so young is like making and then losing a friend in one sitting. Borawski (the poet shortened his first name from Walter as a tribute to Barbra Streisand, which gives you some idea of the cheeky flavor of his work) is particularly adept at capturing the realities of living and dealing with the virus. He can also be funny and heartbreaking—sometimes both at once—particularly when it comes to poems of unrequited love. And, while the introduc tion claims that the poems require reading aloud, their wit and pain come through re markably well on the page. This collection should go a long way toward making Bo rawski’s wonderfully vivid and affecting work much better known. D ALE B OYER SWOLLENING: Poems by Jason Purcell Arsenal Pulp Press. 96 pages, $15.95 Jason Purcell calls themself “a white settler writer from Treaty 6 territory,” as one outside the boundaries of conventional society. Jason dives into their nonbinary personal angst using their dental problems as a metaphor for

This 460-page, forest-green brick designed with a pink font and French flaps is a formi dable collection of contemporary poetry by 31 gay and lesbian Irish writers. With the exception of five born in Iran, Zambia, India, Russia, and the Netherlands, they come from Ireland and Northern Ireland. Most are established poets, yet for some this marks an early publication of their work. In his thoughtful introduction, Maddern ex presses his desire to balance representation, diversity, and quality: “The irony, of course, is that by grouping queer writers in this pub lication, I risk the very type of marginaliza tion I argue against.” Along with his hope that readers will appreciate the poems for their depth and beauty, Maddern clarifies that an author’s identity as queer was not the sole criteria for consideration. (He dislikes “ LGBTQIA ” and the like, which encourage people to tick off boxes.) The title evokes a ballad of the 1798 Irish rebellion, “The Wearing of the Green,” and is inspired by Yeats’ poem of the Irish Civil War, “Easter, 1916,” which places these con temporary writers in historical context. For Yeats, wearing green was not only a nation alist symbol; it became a metaphor for social transformation. A hundred years later, Mad dern notes, ever since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, identity politics are no longer dominated by the Protestant–Catholic, North–South divides. Poems addressing Brexit, climate change, gender identity, and the marginalization of women, refugees, and people of color situate queer Irish poets as part of a global conversation. Maddern has

MY MOTHER SAYS by Stine Pilgaard

Translated by Hunter Simpson World Editions. 160 pages, $17.99

My Mother Says (published in Denmark in 2012) is the first novel by award-winning Danish writer Stine Pilgaard. Quirky and charming, her wry humor comes through even in translation. No one in this novel, ex cept for a couple of friends, is given a name, but it’s not difficult to keep track of who’swho. The narrator is a twenty-something woman whose lover, a zookeeper, is ten years older and wants to settle into marriage and a family. That’s what caused their break-up, and the narrator is broken-hearted. Her family, con sisting of her mother, stepfather, thrice-mar ried father, and current stepmother, have no issues at all about her being a lesbian. Her fa ther is a liberal Protestant minister, a bit of a leftover hippie, who loves Pink Floyd and dotes on his daughter. The narrator returns his affection, but she has little to give her mother, a well-meaning, conventional, insufferable real estate agent who always has to be right. The narrator’s life consists of occasional at tempts at attending college classes; hanging out with her best friend and partying; and fre quent visits to the office of her doctor, a man with whom she’s obsessed. But these events, and the narrator’s deeply felt “musings” that separate each chapter, coalesce into a memo rable work. M ARTHA E. S TONE

TheG & LR

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