Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

Nott, Michael

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresPoetry Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0374279209
ISBN13: 9780374279202
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Jun 18 2024
Pages: 720
Weight: 2.23
Height: 2.13 Width: 6.29 Depth: 9.38
Language: English

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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Nott, Michael

View All

Also in

Literary Figures

View All