Poetry Collections by Queer Authors
In each of these poetry collections, the authors invite you to bear witness to their souls. Each account is personal and powerful, giving voice to those who have historically been relegated to the sidelines. As poet and activist June Jordan wrote, “poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth,” and these poets tell it, in myriad wild, wistful, and wondrous ways. And to find even more literature from queer voices, check out our curated collection.
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Add to Bookshelfthe space between men
by Mia S. Willis
These piercing, surprising poems look to familial history, rituals of faith, and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of Blackness and queerness relate to each other. As the collection evolves, the reader is challenged and empowered to seek expansiveness in spaces that have not previously been excavated, reckon with the complexities of interpersonal relationships, and explore memory as a catalyst for self-determination. Mia S. Willis weaves together intergenerational knowledge and personal discovery, not only to define themselves but to articulate a communal identity that transcends language.
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Dead Girl Cameo
by m. mick powell
In Dead Girl Cameo, m. mick powell closely examines the experiences of Aaliyah Haughton, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Whitney Houston, and other notable superstars who died tragically too soon. In stunning imagery and sensual wordplay using ekphrasis, erasure, digital collage, archival research, and speculative nonfiction in verse, Dead Girl Cameo traverses the intimate realms of superstars to reconfigure Black girlhood, survivorhood, femme friendship, and queer fandom.
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Ecstasy
by Alex Dimitrov
Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous.
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$29.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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soulscript
by June Jordan
Originally released in 1970, soulscript was edited by June Jordan, who wished to make a space for voices historically kept out of mainstream conversations. Included in this gorgeous anthology are some of the foremost queer poets of the 20th century, including Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde, and, of course, June Jordan herself.
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$15.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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All the Flowers Kneeling
by Paul Tran
Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.
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If They Come for Us
by Fatimah Asghar
From Fatimah Asghar comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection that captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. In experimental forms – a bingo card, a mad-lib template, a crossword puzzle – and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
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Time Is a Mother
by Ocean Vuong
In this highly anticipated and deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
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woke up no light
by Leila Mottley
A poignant, rousing debut book of poetry, full of life, from the former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California. woke up no light is a Black girl’s saunter turned to a woman’s defiant strut. These are the hymns of a new generation of poetry. Young, alive, yearning. A mouth swung open and ready to devour. A quest for home in a world that knows only wasteland and wanting. woke up no light confirms Mottley’s arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice — brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.
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$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Take Me With You
by Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson explores themes of love, gender, politics, sexuality, family, and forgiveness with stunning imagery and a fierce willingness to delve into the exploration of what it means to heal and to be different in this strange age. Take Me With You is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Dream of the Divided Field
by Yanyi
Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dreams of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dreams of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Madness
by Sam Sax
In this powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.
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A Hundred Lovers
by Richie Hofmann
An erotic journal of poems, A Hundred Lovers is a catalog of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines.
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Life of the Party
by Olivia Gatwood
A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice. Gatwood weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear.
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Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (LOA #180)
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz
This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop’s work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. In this comprehensive collection, you’ll find Elizabeth Bishop’s entire body of published work as well as poems, prose, and letters never published during her lifetime.
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$45.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Black Girl, Call Home
by Jasmine Mans
With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, spoken word poet Jasmine Mans writes to call herself – and us – home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America – and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman. Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
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Stung with Love
by Sappho
Sappho was a lyric poet who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the 6th century BC. While much of her works have been lost, the surviving texts offer poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance–that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse.
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Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara
by Frank O'Hara
“Sensitively chosen and intelligently introduced … Ford’s selection makes it possible to see more clearly how inward O’Hara’s poetry was at its best … For O’Hara a poem was truthful when it was personal … [His] elegies succeed because long after he discarded any religious belief in immortality, he retained the aesthetic sensibility that took it seriously.” –Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books
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$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Love Speaks Its Name
by J. D. McClatchy
In this lovely collection, J. D. McClatchy has collected a vast, beautiful array of queer poets writing specifically about love in all its messy, difficult, complex, beautiful, and joyous glory. This collection will certainly lead to a further reading list for anyone interested in queer poets.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
