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BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, ar. ticles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE VELOCIPEDE HANDICAP, by Louise W. King, Doubleday & Co., New York: 1965, 240 pp. The latest work of Louise King will be welcomed by fans who remember her contributions to ONE and her four stories in the popular Doubleday book, The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies.

Well crafted, fast-paced and freshingly funny, The Velocipede Handicap throws light and lightness into the gay world of Miss Lillian Richardson and her Miss Moppet.

Half the fun is viewing the gals through the eyes of their loving but not always sympathetic housemate, Mr. Maurice Soule Calhoun.

Mr. Calhoun is out to decorate a house. Miss Lillian is out to change the economy of the world and the maze-like mind of her babyish and lovable Miss Moppet. And Miss Moppet, she's just way out.

With cunning casualness and flagrant stereotypes, Louise King provides "light" reading and provokes laughter and thought about some very heterospecial and homospecial assump-

tions.

Mary-Faith Albert

THE LAUGHTER OF APHRODITE by Peter Green, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N. Y., 1966. Peter Green has written a well-researched biography of the legendary and controversial poetess Sappho of ancient Greece. Using the fragments

of poems left by the poetess, and research in the history of ancient civilizations, the author has presented a poetic and scholarly account of Sappho's life. A major attribute of the book is the detailed descriptions of the Island of Lesbos, the way of life of the islanders, and historical characters who knew Sappho. Readers of ONE may well quarrel with Mr. Green's reliance upon popular psychological assumptions regarding the lesbian personality traits of Sappho.

M. F. A. quarterly magazine, edited by D. V. Smith and J. H. Fredrick; Olivant Press, Drawer 1409, Homestead, Florida 33030; $2 a year.

THE HUMAN VOICE,

Says Walter Lowenfels in The Human Voice, "Everything to do with the poem is part of the poem of the poem-typing, printing, publishing..." And Charles Lamb remarked upon the difficulty of comprehending and appreciating a poem until it has been composed in type and printed. An example is afforded in The Human Voice, where a

poem's effect is modified by other poems' juxtaposition.

How can a reader make due response when one poem follows on the heels of another? How can the editor of a book of poems or of a magazine of poetry serve his function-and balance his budget? Too often he can't, he fails. It is a pity, for poetry is worth preservation, cultivation.

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