Jeanna Kadlec Considers Mary Oliver's Overlooked Queer Desire

At Literary Hub, Jeanna Kadlec remembers her experience reading Mary Oliver for the first time, as a graduate student who "shucked off fundamentalist Christianity and a straight marriage and came out as a lesbian, much to the surprise of my family back in the rural Midwest." Picking up from there: 

Mary Oliver was also a lesbian from the rural Midwest. She was sexually abused by her father; by all accounts, she left home as a young woman and never looked back. By the late 1950s, she was living in New York, and in 1964, she moved in with her partner Mary Malone Cook in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they would live together for the next 40 years until Cook’s death in 2005. Of meeting Cook, Oliver famously wrote, I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.

For someone like me, Mary Oliver’s story looked like one thing: hope. It was a beacon that you could, indeed, leave the place where bad things happened to you and make a new life, where other bad things would likely happen, but where you might also meet a woman whose hand you liked to hold (“A Voice From I Don’t Know Where”).

Read on at Literary Hub.