Happy National Poetry Month! Join us in celebrating by checking out these queer and/or trans poetry collections and novels in verse, and get even more recs by taking a gander at least year’s post!
Queer and Fearless: Poems Celebrating the Lives of LGBTQ+ Heroes by Rob Sanders and Harry Woodgate
Learn about the lives of some of the most important LGBTQ+ heroes in this unique picture book that combines poetry and biographical information to honor those at the forefront of LGBTQ+ history.
Young readers will learn about the lives and legacies of seventeen heroes of the queer community from both past and present. Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk, Cleve Jones, Pauline Park, Richard Blanco, and Pete Buttigieg are just a few of the iconic figures represented in this wonderfully designed and colorful picture book with illustrations by Harry Woodgate. A perfect introduction to the people who have stood up for what they believed in, lived lives according to their own ideals, and their partners, friends, and allies, the poetry in this book provides great read-aloud potential sure to entertain and inform readers of all ages.Beloved children’s book author Rob Sanders makes the lives of the most prominent LGBTQ+ heroes jump off of the page through his beautiful poems and detailed biographies. This title includes a glossary as well as a description of each poetry style, making it an ideal choice for home and classroom.
Just Another Love Poem by Parisa Akhbari
Over the past five years, Mitra Esfahani has known two constants: her best friend Bea Ortega and The Book—a dogeared moleskin she and Bea have been filling with the stanzas of an epic, never-ending poem since they were 13.
For introverted Mitra, The Book is one of the few places she can open herself completely and where she gets to see all sides of brilliant and ebullient Bea. There, they can share everything—Mitra’s complicated feelings about her absent mother, Bea’s heartache over her most recent breakup—nothing too messy or complicated for The Book.
Nothing except the one thing with the power to change their entire friendship: the fact that Mitra is helplessly in love with Bea.
Ariel Crashes a Train by Olivia A. Cole
Ariel is afraid of her own mind. She already feels like she is too big, too queer, too rough to live up to her parents’ exacting expectations, or to fit into what the world expects of a “good girl.” And as violent fantasies she can’t control take over every aspect of her life, she is convinced something much deeper is wrong with her. Ever since her older sister escaped to college, Ariel isn’t sure if her careful rituals and practiced distance will be enough to keep those around her safe anymore.
Then a summer job at a carnival brings new friends into Ariel’s fractured world , and she finds herself questioning her desire to keep everyone out—of her head and her heart. But if they knew what she was really thinking, they would run in the other direction—right? Instead, with help and support, Ariel discovers a future where she can be at home in her mind and body, and for the first time learns there’s a name for what she struggles with—Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—and that she’s not broken, and not alone.
Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell
In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell―the bard of the underloved and overlooked―turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”
The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.
Deviant by Patrick Grace
Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.
Buy it: University of Alberta Press
Where the World Ends and My Body Begins by Amber Dawn
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Amber Dawn reveals a gutsy lyrical sensibility in her debut poetry collection: a collection of glosa poems written as an homage to and an interaction with queer poets such as Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti, and Adrienne Rich. By doing so, Dawn delves deeper into the themes of trauma, memory, and unblushing sexuality that define her work.
Buy it: Amazon
Anatomical Venus by Courtney Bates-Hardy
Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples and calls us to imagine what will persist in the aftermaths.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time—from Korean comfort women during World War II to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual fits within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness—between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like. Bringing together Choi’s signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | IndieBound
Bless the Blood: a Cancer Memoir by Walela Nehanda
A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout.
When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they’re suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don’t use their correct pronouns, and hordes of “well-meaning” but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online.
But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from another realm. Walela’s diagnosis becomes a catalyst for their self-realization. As they fill out forms in the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles or travel to therapy in wealthier neighborhoods, they begin to understand that cancer is where all forms of their oppression intersect: Disabled. Fat. Black. Queer. Nonbinary.
In Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir, the author details a galvanizing account of their survival despite the U.S. medical system, and of the struggle to face death unafraid.
Spilling the Light by Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto
The light must spill to shine.
The thing you must be is yourself.
Intimate and uncompromising, Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto’s debut collection Spilling the Light is a luminous offering to their communities and a defiant declaration of their worth in a world hostile to their queer, disabled, and brown being. “America, is this freedom?” they ask. “I cannot prove to you that / I am a person,” writing boldly of identity, community, liberation, and erasure through a prism of tender moments and powerful reckonings. These are poems of broken hallelujahs and codes/witching, of hunger and fire, of hope and resilience. They are complex, tender, and empowering. They embolden us to become our truest selves, willing us to survive.
Remedies for Chiron by m. patchwork monoceros
In the astrological tradition, Chiron represents our deepest wound, and our lifelong efforts to heal it. Remedies for Chiron is a collection of poems that journey through the days of a young, queer, Black, and newly disabled poet trying to find a place to root and exist in the entirety of those intersections. Moving between cycles of grief and self-discovery, Remedies tells the story of a prismatic existence while also offering a balm for the hurts we all experience and the humility that comes with healing.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Books to Preorder
The Day’s Hard Edge by José Antonio Rodríguez (July 15, 2024)
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.
Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish (September 3, 2024)
Queer writers Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell were life partners, exploring their evolving gender identities together, writing poems side by side, and navigating Caldwell’s severe bipolar disorder until her death by suicide in 2020. In Your Dazzling Death, Donish insists that the intimacy of an ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss; they elegize Caldwell and summon the courage to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding.
With searing honesty and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief. “Let me paint this / entire country / the colors of your face,” they write, showing how wildly scale can shift in the midst of loss. Against the backdrop of “anti-trans bills / moving through state legislatures,” Donish affirms the beauty of their lover’s trans becoming, recalling when they “sounded out / your new potential names / until we found those syllables . . . which tasted, you said, like having / a future.” In the sequence “Kelly in Violet,” the centerpiece of this collection, the story of Caldwell’s death emerges in conversation with the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio, whose words allow Donish to access the shattering event, appearing here in ghostly traces.
Your Dazzling Death memorializes a brilliant woman, ritualizes the work of grief, and subverts linear time, asserting that any shape the future takes will be informed forever by a monumental love that is still alive, not only in the past, but in an envisioned space of timelessness where love and grief are inevitably intertwined.
Letters to Forget by Kelly Caldwell (September 3, 2024)
With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the poems of Kelly Caldwell—many addressed to Cass Donish, her partner in the years before her suicide at thirty-one, swim through a complex matrix of transformations: mental illness, divorce, gender transition, and self-discovery. But they wrestle, too, with the poet’s painful relationships with her family of Christian missionaries, who refused to affirm her identity. In a sequence of “dear c.” poems scattered throughout these pages, Caldwell writes letters to her lover from an out-of-state residential hospital where she is receiving treatment for suicidal depression and mania. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as Job,” she offers us her lucid gaze and her queer take on the biblical figure—an understated yet powerful testament to her own suffering in a society whose structures may not contain her.
Both striking and elusive, both raw and learned, with a delicacy of syntax that challenges us to interrogate becoming itself, Kelly Caldwell asks us from beyond: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?
a body more tolerable by jaye simpson (October 1, 2024)
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems full of mythos, fairy tales, allusion, and magic. Divided into three parts, the book takes an intimate exploration of Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Author jaye simpson conjures up dazzling multiverses throughout their mythic journey as they dance and run wild in their own manifestation of girlhood.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, or sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine.
