Michael Klein (born August 17, 1954)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Michael Klein (born August 17, 1954) is an award-winning poet and author. His poetry collections 1990 and Poets for Life are winners of the Lambda Literary Book Award. He lives in New York City and teaches memoir writing in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

“I am a writer and a teacher. I've written two memoirs: "Track Conditions" about me and the Kentucky Derby winner of 1984, Swale, and "The End of Being Known" which is a book of linked essays about sex and friendship. My new book of poems is "then, we were still living". I live in New York City with Andrew Hood and the young cats Caleb and Cyrus and teach at City College in New York City and in the MFA Program at Goddard College's Port Townsend Campus. I also teach and spend a lot of time in Provincetown, MA at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.”

Michael Klein, 1988, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1121506)

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)

Further Readings:

The Talking Day by Michael Klein
Paperback: 70 pages
Publisher: Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC (January 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1937420272
ISBN-13: 978-1937420277
Amazon: The Talking Day

Fire Island, Bette Davis, reincarnation, the movies, Henry James, the Russian baths, being lonely in public, following strangers, washing a corpse, the FDR Drive and the racetrack all figure predominantly in Michael Klein's The Talking Day - a talking book of poems that speak to the terrible beauty of the world we live in and the world we live without. "I'm dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted" is the first line of the first poem in this book and by the end, that haunting has turned fear into grace.

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices