Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives
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We're here. We're queer. We're fat. This one-of-a-kind collection of prose and poetry radically explores the intersection of fat and queer identities, showcasing new, emerging, and established queer and trans writers from around the world. In writing that is intimate, luminous, and emotionally raw, this anthology challenges negative and damaging representations and offers readers ways to reclaim their bodies, providing stories of support, inspiration, and empowerment that celebrate the diversity and power of fat and queer voices and experiences.
Freedom House
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Freedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins's formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and Afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different "rooms." The speaker isn't afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more--all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.
Ghost :: Seeds
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Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST :: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his "ghost," the "girl-ghost" of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book's expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.
Homie
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Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption.
Two Spirit: Stories, Sex and the Ceremony Behind It All
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Alycia Two Bear's writing offers a glimpse into the ways in which love, grief, sex, motherhood and sexuality can be experienced through the gaze of poetry.
The Day's Hard Edge
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A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity. In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker's world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker's initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one's very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
Junk
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The third book in Tommy Pico's Teebs trilogy, 'Junk' is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons's 'Garbage, ' Teebs names this liminal space 'Junk, ' in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of 'being' for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?
Make Me Rain
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The seven-time NAACP Image Award-winning poet unapologetically celebrates her heritage in a deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society and the depths of her own heart.
Trace Evidence
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In Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection's center sits "On the Overnight from Agadir," a poem that chronicles the poet's survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother's birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
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In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Common Bonds: A Speculative Aromantic Anthology
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Common Bonds is an anthology of speculative short stories and poetry featuring aromantic characters. At the heart of this collection are the bonds that impact our lives from beginning to end: platonic relationships. Within this anthology, a cursed seamstress finds comfort in the presence of a witch, teams of demon hunters work with their rival to save one of their own, a peculiar scholar gets attached to those he was meant to study, and queerplatonic shopkeepers guide their pupil as they explore their relationship needs and desires. Through nineteen stories and poems, Common Bonds explores the ways platonic relationships enrich our lives.
Promises of Gold / Promesas de oro
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A groundbreaking collection of poems addressing how every kind of love-self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural-is birthed, shaped, and complicated by the invisible forces of gender, capitalism, religion, migration, and so on. Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, Promises of Gold explores many forms of love and how "a promise made isn't always a promise kept," as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American Dream laying bare the ways in which "love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts."
Words Like Love
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In her debut collection, poet Tanaya Winder sings the joys, glories, and laments of love. Love is defined by familial, cultural, platonic, and romantic bonds in these emotional and thoughtfully rendered poems. Her voice traverses the darkness in a quest to learn more about the most complex of subjects.
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