GLR September-October 2024

faithful and the fabulous. Midler proudly carried the banner of vul garity—and vulnerability—to her fans in a series of outrageous, often salacious, stage concerts, introducing Delores DeLago, a mermaid in a motorized wheelchair. These performances, which featured songs from all eras, wild costumes and sets, and a host of comic characterizations, eventually mor phed into The Showgirl Must Go On , which opened in Las Vegas in 2008 with more showgirls, more mermaids, and more ram bunctious comedy than ever. Along the way, she recorded over twenty studio and sound track albums, starred in such films as Beaches (1988), Gypsy (1993), and The Stepford Wives (2004), and headlined a Broadway revival of Hello Dolly! in2010, for which she won a Tony Award. Most people probably knew her best for her TV talkshow appearances, notably on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, who in vited her on as his very last guest. R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK IMPERATIVE TO SPARE bySco tt Hightower Rebel Satori Press. 176 pages, $16.95 Scott Hightower’s Imperative to Spare opens with “Aubade Horribilis”—making annus horribilis a poem for dawn, setting the stage for the loss of a partner and a speaker who tells it like it is: “Fate has parted us. I still live/ diminished on the shore.” When his partner, a physician, sud denly dies on a city sidewalk, the speaker reminds us that grief is inevitable but en durable, admitting in “It Would Have Been My Preference to Have Gone Before You” that he doesn’t “have a clue/ what to do/ with myself,” but mustering in “Empty Arms” the resolve to renovate their terrace with “roses, coleus/ and sweet potato vines.” This gumption is also seen in “The World Is Full of Beautiful Things” as it catalogs what the partner avoided: that, although the doctor “would have liked/ growing into an aging/ body,” he will “never have to suffer/ any disabling disease.” In “Continuing,” the speaker reveals that he himself is “trying to figure out/ if I’m still in a meaningful/ con versation.” With plenty of references to popular cul ture (Ethel Merman, Harold and Maude , etc.), biblical characters, and ekphrasis, it’s the poet’s voice that comes through. In “Gashapon,” the speaker identifies with a vending machine’s sign that reads “The light inside/ is broken, but I still work,” confessing: “Me, too, vending ma chine./ Me, too.” Later, a new lover is intro duced, but it’s the lone speaker in “Grief as Improvisation” who gives us hope, the one who can “Keep singing,” offering in

“Whazup * Intact * Fine and Dandy” that “Trivial encounters of daily/ existence are in the end/ what most of life is.” Recalling those flowers on his terrace reminds us “for now/ to ladle out what you can.” M ICHAEL M ONTLACK ONE SOUL WE DIVIDED ACri ti cal Edi ti on of the Diary of Michael Field Edited by Carolyn Dever Princeton Univ. Press. 360 pages, $29.95 Michael Field was a popular Victorian writer who published fourteen plays and seven collections of lyric poetry between 1884 and 1914. And yet, the person named Michael Field did not even exist. “He” was the penname of two women who wrote to gether: Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who was sixteen years her junior and was Bradley’s longtime romantic partner. One Soul We Divided is the first critical edition of selections from the diary they coauthored, with each partner adding entries over a thirty-year period, until their deaths within a year of each other. From the almost 10,000-page unpub lished diary, scholar Carolyn Dever has se lected entries that recorded important public events as the Victorian Age drew to a close, as well as private testimonials to the passion of the two women—for each other and for their artistry. Of course, unlike the male writers they knew, such as Rudyard Kipling, William Yeats, and Robert Browning, they used a pseudonym, creating a male persona in order to be published and to be taken se riously as writers. The name they chose had a more personal meaning to them: it “signi fied their joined identity, their intimacy, their marriage consecrated in service to po etic beauty.” Although little is known about Victorian attitudes toward lesbian relation ships or incestuous pairings, it’s clear that Cooper and Bradley were far from closeted in their private lives and in their heady sphere of contemporary writers and artists. M ARTHA K. D AVIS ESSENTIAL QUEER VOICES OF U.S. POETRY Edited by Christopher Nelson Green Linden Press. 355 pages, $22. This is a large, sprawling array of poems, an all-comers potluck rather than an well ordered anthology. There are genuine lights here, and this volume does gather them in, so long as the reader is prepared to do a bit of sifting. The best-known LGBT poets are all here—Frank Bidart, Marilyn Hacker, Ellen Bass, David Trinidad, Mark Doty, Richard Blanco, Kazim Ali, Jericho Brown—though we only get a couple of poems from each. There is also solid work from many poets whose names are not as well-known. One such poet, Boyer Rickel,

has what is perhaps the best line in the book: “The desperate will consider a boat made of ice,” a type of vessel that was ac tually discussed in the U.K. during World War II. Having read the hundreds of poems in this lexical stewpot without discovering much that was distinctive, let alone memo rable, I was startled into attention near the end by Michael Wasson’s unique ”A Boy and His Mother Play Dead at Dawn,” rooted in family stories from the Battle of Big Hole fought between the U.S. Army and the Nez Perce ( nimiipuu ) in 1877. Wasson, who grew up on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho, captures the drama and the tension with a remarkable economy of words. A LAN C ONTRERAS GEORGE PLATT LYNES AT WORK The catalogue for this exhibition at Yale highlights the full range of 20th-century photographer George Platt Lynes’ work. While focusing on his male nudes, it also includes a selection of his commercial work, including fashion, portraits, and dance. Also included are critical essays by Allen Ellenzweig, author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (2021), and Matthew Leifheit, a photographer and editor of Matte magazine. Ellenzweig’s essay offers an overview of Lynes’ early life, stressing his knack for making artistic and well-connected friends. He befriended Gertrude Stein while in Paris even before attending Yale. His most impor tant relationships were with Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott, two gay artists who formed a couple with whom Lynes became intimately involved (though initially he pursued Wheeler). Leifheit’s essay provides technical details on Lynes’ self-education with cameras and his unique printing and lighting techniques. He also ponders the ethical implications of photog raphers having sex with their models, as Lynes often did. The sixty photographs are arranged chronologically, so the nudes are intermin gled with the fashion and celebrity photos. Ballet dancers display remarkable athleti cism: in Nicholas Magallanes and Marie Jeanne , the female dancer fairly floats in midair as the male barely connects with her. Other models, including gymnasts and acrobats, pose while leaping and lean ing on each other. The images reveal inti macy in all its forms, from the tenderness of the principals in Four Saints in Three Acts to the “staged sexual encounter” in the series The Lovers . C HARLES G REEN The Gary Haller Collec ti on Yale Henry Koerner Center January 19–June 30, 2024

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