Picturing Provincetown’s artists
Photographer Ron Amato has been spending summers in Provincetown for over two decades and he’s aimed his camera on life there, particularly gay male life, capturing the style, verve, and personality of the place where the tip of Massachusetts meets the sea. A new book of photographs gathers images he’s made over the past eight years of the artists there. “Artists of Provincetown” includes 84 portraits, and together make up a portrait of the creative force that thrums there, site of the oldest artist colony in the US. And it’s also a project of preservation — rising housing costs, corporate development, and, as Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham (and portrait subject) terms it in his introduction to the book, “catastrophic expense” are all threatening the sustainability of artist life there. Ann Packard in a hat sits in front of a heap of scrunched paint tubes. A white-suited John Waters scans the horizon from a rowboat. Actress Lea Delaria spreads her arms at the ocean’s edge. Brushes, paint, a handsaw, and windows over water frame Robert Henry. With clean lines and succulents, author Paul Lisicky sits in front of his laptop. And Peter Hutchinson stands in a cluttered cottage kitchen. The book coincides with an exhibition running through Aug. 18 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. For more and to order the book, visit ronamato.com.
Poems of summer creatures
The cicada’s cycle of underground silence and eventual ascension frames the latest poetry collection from Maine-based poet Claire Millikin. “Magicicada” (Unicorn) looks at the insects — their shells “golden scabs/ of wounds only partly healed” — as a way of looking at spending 77 days in solitary confinement as a 14-year-old, when she “learns the winter light inside herself.” The insects and the invertebrates are holy messengers here: “ants carry messages/ between the living and the dead” and jellyfish, whose “circulatory system is the ocean” are “translucently gowned/ in folds of stinging flesh.” There’s the thickness of July nights in the book, a heavy, unsleeping sense of some of the worst of what can happen, and the isolation it breeds. Maps, Millikin writes, mislead us into thinking “we’re all here together . . . when really the bees swallow our private dreams/ one by one without reunion.” The poems gesture at self-starvation and abuse, of not being protected by the people who are meant to protect you. And in the thick night, in the silence, there’s some strange golden song that emerges. “You don’t spend seventeen years buried/ without the need to sing afterwards,” Millikin writes. And she reminds us that we are all “tenants in this world/ of broken light.”
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Centering trans writing
Books that center queer and trans stories are frequently included on banned book lists, and GrubStreet has organized a panel that explores storytelling’s power in the face of fear and censorship. “Writing for Change: Book Bans and Trans Writer Resilience” brings together four panelists to discuss the work of trans-led presses and trans writers. GrubStreet instructor Milo Todd’s forthcoming novel, “The Lilac People,” follows a trans man in 1930s Berlin who remains true to his identity as he lives in hiding from the Nazis and the Allied forces. Emily Zhou, author of “Girlfriends,” works at the feminist trans women-run LittlePus Press. Author Calvin Gimpelevich organizes the monthly T4T reading series, which showcases trans writers. And Denne Michele Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature. The conversation takes place Wednesday, July 24 at 7 p.m., with a reception at 6 p.m., at GrubStreet headquarters, 50 Liberty Drive, in Boston. The conversation is free.
Coming out
”On Strike Against God” by Joanna Russ (Feminist Press at CUNY)
“Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement” by Susannah Gibson (Norton)
“A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Visions of Mary McLeod Bethune” by Noliwe Rooks (Penguin)
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Pick of the week
Annie Romano at An Unlikely Story in Plainville recommends “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco): “Meet a hard-working widow, a lost soul, and a giant Pacific octopus (yes, an octopus) in this heartfelt story that reveals there’s still plenty of living to do for those with their eyes — and hearts — open to the unexpected. A bright debut!”
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Wake, Siren.” She can be reached at [email protected].