Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity. The collection opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men sho...
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"Richard Siken's Crush, the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets volume, is a powerful collections of poems driven by obsession and love. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent erotic...
A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bi...
"Is a song enough to hold all the truths we cannot bear without it? From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired pieces capture the last three...
"For three decades, the legacy of the revered writer, editor, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works. They are as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill's poems unflinc...
"Esteemed scholar, poet, critic, and activist Stephanie Burt anthologizes five decades of verse for and by queer Americans. Interpreted by Burt, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Cyborg Jillian Weise, and othe...
"In 1986 artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman's hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory p...
"From Sappho and the Ancient Greeks to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the modernists, this luminous anthology champions and redefines the spectrum of queer poetry -- from visionary writers whose only safe space to express their intimate thoughts was on the page, to the pioneering po...
"A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Billy-Ray Belcourt begins A History of My Brief Body with a letter to his nohkom, his grandmother. "In the world-to-come," he writes, "everyone is loved by an NDN woman ...
"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 g...
A comprehensive collection of British verse, featuring poems from every era of British history, includes classic poets ranging from Chaucer to Auden, and offers works by little-known women writers and the best of Britain's contemporary poets
"Poet, writer, and hip-hop educator Tony Keith Jr. makes his debut with a powerful YA memoir in verse, tracing his journey from being a closeted gay Black teen battling poverty, racism, and homophobia to becoming an openly gay first-generation college student who finds freedom in...
"A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. H...
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away-- loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it -- that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard.
A young black man struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.