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Across the Page: 2008 Holiday Gift Guide

This month’s Across the Page features new books by the iconic cartoonist Alison Bechdel, nature poet Mary Oliver, and writer and performance artist Miranda July, to help complete your holiday gift guide.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)

For your friends who are still mourning the end of Alison Bechdel’s classic series, pick up the newly released The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. This beautifully bound collection features sixty of the newest unpublished strips with selections from the previous eleven volumes.

Dykes to Watch Out For has been syndicated in fifty newspapers over the last twenty-five years. The Essential includes an inspiring introduction by Bechdel and a hilarious Index ? with graphics, of course ? that references everything from “Beefcakes” to “Golf, Lesbian Predilection for,” and “Oxford Cloth Fetish.”

Bechdel’s introduction opens with the line “Good God” and reveals how and why she began the strip back in the early eighties.She describes pushing through the pile of rejection letters (including a pointed one from the poet Adrienne Rich) to develop her voice and craft.

Bechdel charts how she moved from a basic desire to “capture” the people that so engaged her in New York City to the comfort she found in seeing “my queer life reflected back” on the page to the fear that in her attempt to represent she has made lesbians seem “conventional” or ? gasp ? “boring.”

In the end, Bechdel poses the question to the reader: “Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else?”

I tend to agree with Rich, who later became of fan of Bechdel and describes Dykes to Watch Out For as work that explores the humanity of a community long disregarded ? with humor, insight and intelligence.

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is absolutely addicting. Whether you came of age alongside the motley crew of friends featured in Bechdel’s strip or you’re meeting them for the first time, it’s impossible to stop reading their stories of politics, work, sex, and love.

The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver (Beacon)

Lesbian poet Mary Oliver’s exceptional new collection, The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, features thirty-five of her most well-known poems, two short essays, and ten new poems.

Oliver has won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and is one of the best-selling poets in the country.She has published seventeen books of poetry, five books of prose, including one with photographs, and an audio book.

As with most of Oliver’s work, the pieces featured in The Truro Bear and Other Adventures focus on nature and animals. The speaker in many of the poems struggles for connection and to understand his or her place in the world.

The poem, “Toad,” begins with the hauntingly simple line “I was walking by.He was sitting there.” The speaker reveals its thoughts about the world to the Toad ? “About this cup/ we call a life” ? and wonders aloud how their perspectives must be different.

He might have been Buddha ? did not move, blink, or frown,

not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined

anguish of language passed over him.

In the poem “Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered,” the speaker tells of an afternoon when it overheard two voices in the woods and was “thrilled/ to be granted this secret,/ that the coyotes, walking together/ can talk together.”

Even when it turns out that the voices actually came from two women, the speaker holds to this moment of faith:

And it has stayed with me

as a present once given is forever given.

Easy and happy, they sounded,

those two maidens of the wilderness

from which we have ?

who knows to what furious, pitiful extent ?

banished ourselves.

The expansive poem, “The Summer Day,” begins with the line “Who made the world” and ends with the personal: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life.”

The world seems to slow down in these poems as Oliver takes a closer look at everything we’re too busy to see, let alone appreciate.

Learning To Love You More, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July (Prestel USA)

Learning To Love You More is the book version of artist Harrell Fletcher and bisexual writer and artist Miranda July’s website LearningToLoveYouMore.com, which was created almost seven years ago.

The website posts “assignments” for readers and then features the work online.The assignments are all numbered and range from “Make an encouraging banner” to “Give advice to yourself in the past.” The project’s title comes from artist Emma Hedditch for “Assignment 35: Ask your family to describe what you do.”

Miranda July photo credit: Harrell Fletcher

In the introduction, July and Fletcher write that even though they are artists trying to discover new ideas daily, “our most joyful and even profound experiences often come when we are following other people’s instructions.”

The work featured here comes from all over the world, from New York City to Qatar, and captures the art of everyday life. The website and book include pictures and prose, sometimes both.

The responses are as varied as the assignments, ranging from interviews with people who have been to war to a letter a woman writes to her unborn children. Several of the pieces feature contributions from gay and lesbian artists.

For “Assignment 55: Photograph a significant outfit,” a man from San Francisco took a picture of the outfit he wore the day he came out at his office job in Kansas.

In “Assignment 42: List five events from 1984,” Justine Jimenez writes about falling in love with a girl named Tiffany. The list itself documents a first crush, including Justine’s fear of coming out in high school and ending with, “I burned parts of my journal and the love letters I got from Tiffany Diggs and flushed the burned pieces down the toilet.”

The book also includes the essay “A Modest Collective: Many People Doing Simple Things Well,” by Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson, which provides an interesting history of “assignment art,” and places it in the context of other movements, including feminist art.

Learning To Love You More is more than just a cool coffee-table book. It’s an unusual and thought provoking gift as well as a cool coffee-table book.

Other Book Ideas:

Emma Donoghue’s new release, The Sealed Letter (Harcourt)

Newly appointed Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan’s The Niagara River (Grove Press)

Galaxy Craze’s Tiger, Tiger, the follow-up to By the Shore – Buy them both! (Black Cat)

Awkward and Definition and Potential by Ariel Schrag (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster)

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

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