Looking for the Gulf Motel, H, Talking to the Moon
Further reading from Who’s Yer Daddy? contributors.
February 08, 2013
If Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem whet your appetite for more of his work, you’re in luck: his most recent collection of poetry, Looking for the Gulf Motel (University of Pittsburgh Press), came out last year. Informed by his experience as a gay Latino man, the poems create a portrait of his Cuban, and distinctly American, family legacy.
Editor Jim Elledge also released a new book of poems last year: H (Lethe Press), which Elledge refers to as “an impressionistic biography” of tortured gay artist Henry Darger, an outsider art legend. Darger lived an unusual life after enduring a boyhood marked by tragedy (including living in an asylum for “feeble-minded children”), and Elledge’s poems succeed in capturing the queer, dark strangeness of Darger’s art.
Noël Alumit’s 2007 novel Talking to the Moon (Carroll & Graf) is another “must” for gay readers’ home libraries. Centered on the family of a Filipino postman who is the victim of a racial hate crime, the book is rich with magical realism and eccentric characters. While the father worships the moon, the mother regularly communicates with the Virgin Mary and their gay (and unlucky in love) son has telephone conversations with his dead brother.
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