Poetry Collections by Queer Authors

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.