Miss Price & Me: A Verse Memoir

Davidson Garrett’s Miss Price & Medoesn’t fool around, and it isn’t shy about telling a robust, exuberant story in verse about a young man’s religious love of opera and religious fear of his homosexuality, and how they propelled him from a strait-laced upbringing in Shreveport, Louisiana to New York City in the early 1970s. Here is Mr. Garrett at the other end of a life in the theater, looking back with undiminished enthusiasm and pitch perfect memory for early encounters with opera and Leontyne Price, where the twin strands of his story wind around each like snakes in the caduceus around the staff of his identity. Bravo, Sir! —Arthur Russell, author,At the Car Wash – 2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize In this charming, coming-of-age verse memoir, Davidson Garrett guides us through his sexual awakening on the wings of Leontyne Price’s “lustrous voice.” Born in Evangelical Louisiana, bullied for his stocky body, bedeviled by his attraction to men, he finds his refuge and his rapture, listening to his Diva, eyes closed, “as if in prayer.” Brave pilgrimages to hear her, who is for him “the Voice of God” — New Orleans, Bloomington, Atlanta, San Francisco — lead to a “lightning-bolt epiphany”…