Tender Voyeur

Tender Voyeur, Donald Platt’s ninth collection, tells the story of the author’s coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of John Singer Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted. A major ekphrastic project, Tender Voyeur features twenty-six high-quality reproductions of Sargent’s paintings and drawings, interlaced with poems that interrogate the place of same-sex love at the turn of the 20th century and explore conflicting sexual desires in the different worlds of Sargent and of the author. An essay by historian and curator Trevor Fairbrother accompanies the work, discussing the political, financial, and puritanical obstacles that have hampered open discussion of Sargent’s sexuality. An interview between Platt and Fairbrother, whose groundbreaking study of homoeroticism in Sargent’s oeuvre inspired Tender Voyeur, acts as a coda, providing additional insight into the work and the collaboration that brought it forward.

Trevor Fairbrother wrote a doctoral dissertation on John Singer Sargent. His early work was spotlighted when The New York Times hailed his discoveries regarding the infamous portrait known as Madame X (Hilton Kramer, ＂The Case of Madame’s Shoulder Strap, Feb. 1,＂ 1981). He curated the exhibition John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist for the Seattle Art Museum, and authored a monograph with the same name (Yale University Press 2000). Donald Platt is the author of eight previous collections, including Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (Cavankerry Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, and Ploughshares, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the NEA and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s MFA Program.