Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. King James appointed the “star preacher of the age,” famous for his metaphor-laden sermons, Dean of St. Long dependent on patronage to cover debts, “slowly, in both doubt and hope, Donne’s eyes turned towards the Church,” and he was ordained. Alongside poems that “glorify and sing the female body and heart,” Rundell writes, “are those that very potently don’t.” It should come as no surprise, she notes, that someone who lived through a plague, watched many of his 12 children die young, and had suicidal thoughts wrote some of literature’s greatest poems about death. Working for a wealthy friend, he wrote numerous rakish, erotic verse with stylistic “tussles and shifts,” often untitled, which he shared with others rather than publish. Donne dressed fashionably and wore “his wit like a knife in his shoe.” In 1596, bereft after his brother’s death, Donne was “keen to get away” and tried his hand at privateering. At London’s Inns of Court, he mostly studied frivolity and wrote some “bold and ornery and intricate” poetry that “sounded like nobody else.” As Rundell reports, The Oxford English Dictionary records some 340 words he invented.

A “lifelong strainer after words and ideas,” a youthful Donne kept a commonplace book at Oxford-now lost Rundell suggests its technique of literary alchemy influenced his method of writing. “He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” She nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived. A staunch admirer-she places the “finest love poet in the English language” alongside Shakespeare-her book is an “act of evangelism.” Donne “was incapable of being just one thing,” writes the author. Prizewinning children’s-book author Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, delivers a fresh, delightful biography of John Donne (1572-1631). An enthusiastic biography of the metaphysical poet, scholar, and cleric.

Katherine rundell donne