and others, Bawer was one of the leading figures of the New Formalism movement in poetry. His poetry appeared in the 1996 anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, and he contributed to an essay (described as "heavy-handed" by Publishers Weekly) to the movement's manifesto, Poetry after Modernism. Bawer's poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, Paris Review, and The New Criterion. A chapbook of Bawer's poems, Innocence, was published in 1988 by Aralia Press, which also published individual poems by Bawer in other forms. A full-length collection of Bawer's poetry, Coast to Coast, appeared in 1993. It was selected as the year's best first book of poetry by the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. Film criticism From 1987 to 1990, Bawer served as the film critic for the conservative monthly The American Spectator. He also wrote several articles on film for The New York Times and other publications. A collection of his film reviews, The Screenplay's the Thing, was published in 1992. "Best known as a literary critic, Bawer is an engaging, astute, formidable film reviewer as well", wrote Publishers Weekly, describing Bawer as a "[p]olitically unpredictable" critic who "deflates the arty (Caravaggio), the preachy (Platoon; The Milagro Beanfield War) and the kitschy (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but gives thumbs up to The World According to Garp, Raising Arizona, Roxanne, Crossing Delancey and The Mosquito Coast... One wishes he were a full-time movie critic." Bawer later wrote that he left The American Spectator because of a conflict with an editor over a reference to homosexuality in one of his reviews. He has since returned to the magazine as a freelance book reviewer. Gay rights A Place at the Table Bawer's book A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993) was published by Simon & Schuster. He described it in its first pages as "a reflection on the theme of homosexuality", motivated by the fact that current debates had "generated a lot more heat than light". The book, which criticized both heterosexuals' antigay prejudices and the political and cultural stereotypes which, in his view, were foisted on many gay people by the "queer subculture", received much attention. Reviews in mainstream media tended to be positive, while, as Bawer himself later put it, "antigay conservatives and queer lefties alike savaged the book" Author and attorney Dale Carpenter later summed up the response of