Andre Bagoo
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Causes in time: on ‘Thom Gunn – A Cool Queer Life’ by Michael Nott
Andre Bagoo Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life (Faber, 2024) begins with the seed of an idea. Over the course of its 720 pages, that seed builds into an overwhelming crescendo. The idea, never stated but left to interpretation, is this: the death of Gunn’s mother by suicide when he was just 15…
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‘The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus’: a poem by Andre Bagoo
image © Marlon James The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus He looks at me and sees right through me, as if I am nothing, as if he could live without me. I bathed him each day, moistly kissing the rise of his flesh, slapping his limbs then falling away, down…
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Thom Gunn’s carnival: a radical inside job
Thom Gunn, 1986. Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark. Courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Copyright Arizona Board of Regents Andre Bagoo Thom Gunn’s poem ‘The Messenger’ starts with a question: Is this man turning angel as he stares At one red flower whose name he does not know,…