Joan Larkin

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A Woman Like That : Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories by Joan Larkin (Editor)

Although A Woman Like That is full of brave and often wrenching coming-out stories, with the expected emphasis on overcoming social and familial pressure (more than one of these writers describes involuntary stays in mental hospitals), the combined effect of these wonderful memoirs is more erotic than political--and more funny than erotic. In "Picture This," Cecilia Tan describes her suburban mother snapping up copies of Penthouse to send to friends and relatives because it contained Tan's first nationally published fiction. In "What Comes First," Holly Hughes refers in passing to a gay-bashing incident at her college cafeteria -- someone threw a fruit cocktail at her -- and goes on to recount her difficulty at attracting a lesbian lover. "It had been so easy with men," she recalls, "All you had to do was bend over at the bowling alley and something would happen." Judith Katz remembers a game called "Tom and Tom" that she used to play with two little boys on her street: "Tom and Tom ... were human cartoon characters who ran around together and got their genitalia caught up in all kinds of elastic knots and snags." For some, Desert Hearts; for others, Road Runner. --Regina Marler

Cold River : Poems by Joan Larkin

Joan Larkin's Lambda Award-winning Cold River deals in universal obsessions: sex and death, filtered in this case through memory and social consciousness. Innocence meets experience early in the book, intertwining in the tercets of "In the Duchess (Sheridan Square, 1973)," in which the young speaker watches "the illegal dancing" of "strong beauty" on the scuffed barroom floor. Remembering the scene from today, she knows she'll "soon cut my hair, soon / sharpen cuffs and creases,/ burn bold as the stone/ butch staring back/ in whose smile my fear/ and wanting found a mirror." Throughout the book, she tempers her bold politics with a warm embrace for her friends, as in "Sonnet Positive," a fine poem wherein the speaker accompanies a friend on a "slow drive/ to Vermont on back roads--lunch, a quick look/ at antiques." Concluding when they pull over to examine some merchandise, she writes:
  

He's not actually sick yet, he reminds me,
reaching for the next pill. His bag's full
of plastic medicine bottles, his body
of side effects, as he stoops to look at a low
table whose thin, perfect legs perch on snow.

Joan Larkin

From contemporarypoetry.com

Excerpt:

Joan Larkin's most recent book of poetry is Cold River  (Painted Leaf Press, 1997). Joan Larkin's previous collections of poetry are Housework and A Long Sound.  She co-edited the anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) with Carl Morse.  She is the author of a prize-winning play, The Living, and co-translator with Jaime Manrique of Sor Juana's Love Poems.   A teacher of writing for many years, she has served on the faculties of Brooklyn, Sarah Lawrence, and Goddard colleges.  She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and currently lives and writes in New York City...

This site hosts four poems by Larkin:

Origins

By Joan Larkin

This poem is reprinted from A Long Sound with the author's
permission.

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