Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe

Lethe publisher Berman (Trysts) invites a wide cast of authors to reimagine Poe and his works through a queer lens, with mixed results. Many of the stories emphasize homage to Poe’s style and end up overwritten as a result. Those that exchange faithful adherence to diction and structure for a stronger focus on character tend to be more successful, most notably Cory Skerry’s “Midnight at the Feet of the Caryatids” and Tansy Rayner Roberts’s “The Raven and Her Victory.” Berman wisely takes a broad-brush approach, covering not only reimaginings of Poe’s tales but also Poe the man and the act of reading Poe’s fiction. This allows a wider variety of pieces, poetic as well as prose, and rescues the book from being overwhelmed by its source material. (July)