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![Thom Gunn](https://books.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Thom Gunn
A Cool Queer Life
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker).
Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.
Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.
Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nott, who coedited 2022's The Letters of Thom Gunn, delivers an assured biography of the iconoclastic poet, who died in 2004. Raised in WWII-era England, Gunn was profoundly affected by the suicide of his mother when he was 15, after which he became withdrawn and took up poetry to work through his emotions. Nott traces Gunn's development as an artist, exploring how early stabs at metrical poems gave way to free verse experimentation and such idiosyncratic forms as "gossip" poems that dealt with "complex ideas like identity and self-reflection" while dishing on Gunn's acquaintances. Balancing literary analysis with a vivid account of Gunn's boundary-pushing personal life, Nott details the poet's open relationship with longtime partner Mike Kitay, whom Gunn met while attending Cambridge University and lived with in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for much of his life. Gunn was active in San Francisco's drug scene and a frequent user of LSD, which he credited with helping "my writing in many ways." The great achievement of Nott's biography is that it shows how poetry influenced Gunn's life and how his life influenced his poetry, discussing, for instance, how reading Shakespeare and Stendhal made Gunn feel "as if anything were possible" and how he intended his 1971 collection, Moly, to be "an invitation to discuss homosexuality and LSD." The result is a triumphant celebration of a larger-than-life writer.