This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching

Abstract

Julia Lin Miah TSAR A truly international author confronts her simultaneously Taiwanese and Canadian past through these interlinked stories. The book functions as a loosely wrought family saga, leading the reader from modern Vancouver to 1940s Taiwan and back through the stories of immigrants, activists, and mothers. Julia Lin’s prose is frank and down-to-earth while retaining its capacity for subtlety and grace. Antjie Krog Skinned Seven Stories Press Antjie Krog has long been recognized as one of South Africa’s finest poets, but Skinned is her first collection available in English outside of the country. Translated from the original Afrikaans, the book includes reflections on romantic and familial love, Xhosa and Zulu poetry, the troubled social politics of South Africa, and the fickleness of the aging human body. Nota Bene in human experience: being born, falling in love, dying. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching. Megan Volpert, ed. Alexander, Arkansas. Sibling Rivalry. 2013. isbn 9781937420420 Had Plato been privy to This AssignmentIsSoGay ,hemighthavechanged his proclamation that would banish poets from the city. This collection of LGBTIQ poetry does not disappoint from the first to the last page, offering up not only personal pedagogical anecdotes but also the most beautiful yet painful, heart-wrenchingly honest poetry I can recall reading in recent memory. Not only do the poems throughout this anthology challenge the act of bodily perception , they challenge the boundaries of identity itself by placing in question traditional perceptions of gender, sexuality, and the human body. How do we define corpus? Is a body political in nature? social? gendered? The poems in this body of work suggest that in all its various guises and forms, the body is a formidable —although fragmented—force to be reckoned with, despite various efforts to contain and define it. The poems throughout this collection ask us to question the cultural , social, and historical presumptions and assumptions on which they are based by drawing out the differences involved between the production and determination of meaning , and this process of engagement always involves anxiety. But, as this anthology reminds us, that’s because there’s something to lose, something ultimately at stake. From the raw beauty of Nicholas Wong’s “Suicide Mission,” telling readers of the ways in which “language / [is] second-hand in outlining the loan of pain,” to Nina Pick’s likening of a poetic meter to that of a human heartbeat in “School of Embodied Poetics,” these poetic works serve as a beacon, a lighthouse of sorts, not just for the LGBTIQ community but for anyone who has ever been seen as “other.” Several poems, such as Josephina Starmack’s “Earth Science” and Joseph Ross’s “Conversation After Class 1,” interrogate typical ways of viewing landscapes but also put the very definition of what it means to be “natural” in question by luring out an artful and untamed beauty that exists in nature but is perceived by others as unnatural. This camouflaged metaphor highlights subjectivity but also personifies the differences between seeing and being seen, as we find with Erin Northern’s “Diagnosis.” Editor Megan Volpert’s introduction acknowledges that great strides have been made in helping young students come “out of the closet ,” claiming that this book sets out to offer a space where people from all walks of life can interact on a human level and invest in what she terms “the ethics of caring.” Indeed, This Assignment Is So Gay not only meets the mark, it exceeds it, and by a very large measure. Despite current media bombardment that often numbs our senses and the tremendous weight of history that can make human agency feel like a futile endeavor, this book is driven by a desire to let each and every human being know that they can make a difference in society. How September–October 2013 • 67 68 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews very refreshing, indeed—and, dare I say, necessary. Shellie McCullough University of Texas, Dallas C. P. Cavafy. Complete Plus: The Poems of C. P. Cavafy in English. George Economou with Stavros Deligiorgis, tr. Bristol, United Kingdom. Shearsman. 2013. isbn 9781848612662 When Plato compared Greeks...