GLR May-June 2025

of Garbo as a part of Kuiper’s self, a doppelganger perhaps, an alter ego whom she is learning to love as she loves her wife and daughter. It would allow us to think of experience in that in-be tween world that is the imagination. Kuiper’s poems almost always address a person, but often the addressee is left unidentified. But even when she addresses her daughter or her wife, she is talking to the part of herself that remains elusive, alluring, and out of reach. “The Wound” is a fascinatingly elusive poem that begins in winter, when the dog swallowed a needle and a cedar was taken down. The poem then jumps to the time “When I went to the garden where the poet/ had drowned and asked the groundkeeper/ to show me the place—the exact place—/ he looked me in the eye and shook his head.” Kuiper’s notes at the back do not identify what’s going on. But the epigraph to “The Wound” is by Theodore Roethke, and Kuipers is visiting the site where Roethke died of a heart at tack while swimming in a friend’s pool, a pool later filled in and transformed into a Zen rock garden, part of what now is Bloedel Reserve (which had been a private home in Roethke’s time). The poem wants an exactitude that it cannot find. It then it turns to address her child as a way of grounding itself: “You, child, were learning the four phases of plant/ regeneration, and wanted to explain to me the way/ evergreens bud.” Addressing a child as “child’ is rather formal and literary, and it took me aback. But the child could easily be Kuipers herself. The poem ends: “You always hated it/ when I let you tell me something I already know.” The wound of the title appears to be the injury of silently accepting knowledge that one already knows. And so we return to the Roethke epigraph at the top of the poem where he urges poets to go to the depths, where they will discover something they didn’t know. Kuipers seems to be daring herself to avoid the obvious, to do the dangerous work involved in writing poetry. Readers think that poets understand their own poems, but often poets are as surprised as anyone by what comes out. One more example: In “Spa Days,” Kuipers recalls the kind of care required for heterosexual life—the shaving, the moistur izing, the preparation of her body for the male gaze. “I didn’t hate those days, or the men I then took/ to bed, though I was al ways trying to fuck my way/ toward the woman I believed was hidden/ inside each of them.” The men she was attracted to were not simply males; there was a woman in them that she was hop ing to bring to the surface. At the same time, whether she knew it or not, she was hoping to bring into being the woman she wanted all along. As she learns in “The Magician at the Wood pile”—where, after cremating all the “dicks” she ever met, “The dicks I took in my mouth. The dicks/ that didn’t ask permission. The dicks I loved/ and the dicks I never really knew”—the con flagration doesn’t end with punishment or suffering. She “ex pected to hear screams” coming from the blaze, but what she gets is warmth and a glow on “everything but my face/ suddenly in darkness like I’m performing a magic trick, like the magic trick is me.” She becomes the magician, and the magician brings Kuipers into being like a rabbit from a hat. This is Keetje Kuipers’ fourth book of poetry. Let us hope that she continues to be a magician, maintaining the dialog be tween her various selves and her shifting worlds with such grace, complexity, and beauty. ______________________________________________________________ David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine. 50

H ANK T ROUT Boomers in Boston ZIGZAG: And Other Stories by Philip Gambone Ra tt ling Good Yarns Press. 367 pages, $18.95 S lives of older gay men portrayed in our fiction. Whether it’s due to ageism or this community’s obsession with youth, it’s difficult to find fiction that addresses the complex, day-to-day lives of gay men over fifty. While our stories of coming out, first crushes, first heartbreaks, and the like are relatable, many of us older readers yearn for works of fiction that explore and reflect our lives now as gay men. Philip Gambone’s second book of short stories, Zigzag , rushes into this void. In sixteen interrelated sto ries, he writes about “ordinary” gay men in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties as they experience the everyday joys and letdowns in their lives in Boston. Gambone creates a diverse set of characters that are readily recognizable to those of us who live in the world they describe. Perhaps we even recognize a bit of ourselves in some of them. In flashbacks, confessions, and tall tales, these men tell us that they, like us, have loved and lost; been hurt and hurt others; succeeded in a chosen career or failed miserably at another; had loving sup portive families or bigoted, hurtful siblings; been monogamous in relationships or pursued a more complicated sex life. They en dured the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, and some still wres tle with the losses and grief from those years. They are survivors, and most are intent on indulging in as much love and compan ionship as they can in the years left to them. Selecting only a few representative stories from the sixteen in Zigzag was difficult. Two will have to suffice. In “The Bo hemians,” Patrick, the narrator, is a 64-year-old man who has just moved to the South End, Boston’s gayest enclave, after breaking a fourteen-year relationship with Lincoln. Patrick goes to a local diner, Crumble, for coffee one Saturday morning and soon befriends three guys, Jake and Wilson, a couple, and Henry, the youngest at 48. They soon form a literary klatch and, over Patrick’s objections, the group adopts the nickname “The Bo hemians,” a nod to Puccini’s LaBohème . (“We are all just a bit too middle-class to think of ourselves as bohemians,” Patrick thinks.) One Saturday morning, Henry announces that he is adopting a baby. Patrick wastes no time letting the group know that he thinks it’s a horrible idea. As Henry assumes parenting duties and Jake and Wilson start making plans without Patrick, the group grows apart. Patrick reflects on his relationship with Lincoln and the other Bohemians and tries to come to grips with people and things that have come and gone. As he laments the extent to gay life has changed, we feel his loneliness and sense of being left out of things, and his sadness at being unable to deal with change. In “The Walker,” Tavish, a cynical seen-it-all 68-year-old cur OME OF US who came out in the 1960s and ’70s are still here, and there are enough of us to constitute a significant demographic in American society. Yet only rarely are the

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