‘All We Know’ by Lisa Cohen
Lisa Cohen’s lush biography, All We Know (Farrar Straus and Giroux), is a staggering labor of love that offers a triptych of three women of a queer persuasion. Cohen sets this story in the early 20th century, giving her audience a catalogue of the largely forgotten life during that time. Her subjects–the great intellectual Esther Murphy, the celebrity connoisseur Mercedes de Acosta, and the fashion maverick Madge Garland…
‘Black Marks on White Paper’ by Michelle Antoinette Nelson (Love the Poet)
On the page, Love’s poems remind you that rhyme is the root word for rhythm. Contemporary poetry may have long shied away from the limits of rhyme, but Love’s wordplay is refreshing, executed with precision and a clear, performable quality. All of her poems have a direct relationship with their audience, relying on a rich sense of community instead of any writer-reader barrier.
