The latest from author Kelly Cogswell!
Finally! Kelly Cogswell’s first book in French, Les Odyssées de Fally Dogswell has found a home with Tetrapod Press. Also available in an English translation by the author.
It’s summer. An American writer wanders Paris. The city is foreign and hostile after several years back home in New York. She’s tripped by stones. Hassled by strangers. “Hey! Lesbian!” Even her journal betrays her when French starts intruding, replacing her native tongue.
Fighting to express herself, memories float to the surface. Her first loves. The family nest in far-off Kentucky where churches spring up as ferociously as blackberry bushes. The banishment by her mother when she pronounced that word, lesbian. Then her life in New York where she met a woman herself cast adrift from Cuba by a violent wave of homophobia.
Drawn from her diaries, this account of all her exiles has become a lyrical meditation on memory, language, and foreignness itself.
EATING FIRE: MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN AVENGER
Kelly Cogswell
University of Minnesota Press, March 2014
Spanning the twenty years from the Culture Wars through the War on Terror, EATING FIRE begins in 1992 with the author’s transformation from ex-Southern Baptist hickster poet into fire-eating Lesbian Avenger. She haunts the streets of New York, battles cops on Fifth Avenue, eats fire in front of the White House, and mobilizes 20,000 lesbians for the International Dyke March. She also squirms through excruciating meetings and finds true love. Several times.