Poetry

Evelyn Berry's debut poetry collection, Grief Slut, is an examination of the queer lineage of pleasure, grief, and resilience in the American South.Berry offers a portrait of a girl living through boyhood and grappling with the violence of nostalgia in poems that blend high art, archival slivers, and Taco Bell. This collection invites us into a landscape home to sloppy kissers, swamp suitors, scrappy "limbwrecked boys," and drag queens drenched in glitter sweat, where "each day is trespass" and queer youth fight to "hear one another breathe just a little while longer."

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition is edited by Dr Simon Avery, a specialist in queer history and culture at the University of Westminster.

Hand in Hand with Love is a celebration of queer voices throughout the ages, featuring an electrifying range of poems from Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, Wilfred Owen and many more.

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 poets who paved the way for decades to come. Together, these dynamic voices offer a vivid archive of queer identity to be celebrated, discovered and treasured.

By: Marla Taviono, 2024, Paperback

What makes this such a stellar read is not only is Marla aware of who she is, but she's finally got to the point where she's unabashedly ready to tell us as well!" —Tyler Merritt, author of I Take My Coffee Black and Creator of The Tyler Merritt Project

When you've spent your entire life defined by your faith, who are you when that faith shatters, leaving you to pick up broken pieces, wondering if anything can be saved? Marla Taviano—author, single mom, and former Christian—set out on a journey to find out.

What she uncovered was that, after deconstructing a toxic belief system and working to dismantle systems of injustice, some things hadn't changed. She still loved people and wanted them to be free and whole—and she wanted that for herself too. It just looked different now. So whole: poems on reclaiming the pieces of ourselves and creating something new talks about looking back to move forward, new thoughts on god, our inner lives, embodied living, and books, books, books.

If you long for the freedom to be your true self, if you ache for healing and wholeness for yourself and a broken world, if you need some lighthearted fun amid all the hard, Marla's got you. This book is a collection of mini-love letter poems to herself and all of us.

By: Marla Taviano, 2023, Paperback

Hey There, Word Artist!

Yes, you. If you love words—reading them, writing them, hanging them on your wall and looking at them, putting them together in fun ways, making collages—you’re a word artist.

Maybe you love words, but you’ve never really thought about “word art” as a thing.

Word art is a really cool way to mix artistic mediums. It’s basically language + visual images. Words + pictures.

In this book, there are all kinds of words you can cut out and add to any photo, illustration, painting—whatever—to create your own word art. And hopefully you’ll use your own words as well.

Then, if you’d like, hang it on your wall or your refrigerator or give it to a friend or share it with the world.

We could all really use more word art made with love

By: Kai Chen Thom, 2023, Paperback

A national bestseller in Canada, hailed by The New York Times as an “intimate expression of self-acceptance and forgiveness, tenderly written to fellow trans women and others.”

“Required reading.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 bestselling author of Untamed

A THEM AND AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD

What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred.

But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and ideals she’d built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith: she wrote. Whether prayers or spells or poems—and whether there’s a difference—she wrote to affirm the outcasts and runaways she calls her kin. She wrote to flawed but nonetheless lovable men, to people with good intentions who harm their own, to racists and transphobes seemingly beyond saving. What emerged was a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.

2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards Gold Medal Winner
2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner
2022 Over the Rainbow Short List
2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist
2021 Bookshop's Indie Press Highlights

You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection.

The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between.

One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

For readers of Rupi Kaur (Milk and Honey) and Cheryl Strayed, a book small enough to carry with you, with messages big enough to stay with you, from one of the most quotable and influential poets of our time.

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, illustrated throughout with evocative line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart. Divided into three sections (love, the world, and becoming) of one liners, couplets, greatest hits phrases, and longer form poems, it has something for everyone, and will be placed in stockings, lockers, and the hands of anyone who could use its wisdom.

By Marla Taviano, 2021 Paperback, Poetry

unbelieve (verb): to disbelieve or distrust something;
to abandon a particular belief

there once was a
very good Christian girl
who had all the answers
it was so very simple
quite quite clear
the Bible made it so
it all went according to plan
for well over three decades
and then something happened

By: L. Carson Woody (Author), 2024, Paperback

This is a survival story.

Take a deep dive into this powerful and emotional story. It’s a hurricane of feelings and fury to find truth and acceptance. If you can push through the darkness, light will be waiting to embrace you on the other side. So will love. So much love.

A collection of poetry and writings by L. Carson Woody, Surviving Child chronicles their teenage and young adult years. As she identifies her sexuality, Woody bravely expresses their perspective on what it was like to grow up gay in an evangelical church while facing the realization that being gay in the south isn’t safe or acceptable. After a long period of questioning, hiding, and depression, she uncovers the beauty of self acceptance and finds renewed hope.

By: Willie Lee Kind III, 2023, Paperback

As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt. This commentary on gospel traditionalism is armed with dreams of helping to reshape lived realities where being your truest self could be shunned or ostracized in deeply religious communities. It ruminates on this Deep South narrative by exploring how the age of social media has created a rich underground counterculture that offsets the surface rituals of grief and shame. The poems illuminate lineages of performance and fellowship for queer descendants of the last Black folks out of the Carolina cotton fields, and features Anansi-like speakers (Anansi is a trickster spider featured in West African and Caribbean folklore) while delving into old-school sensibilities and advice. This gospel-fugue bends language in the backwoods of faith and desire. Pulling figures from the stories of childhood―Icarus, a flying boy wanting to escape; Asterion the Minotaur―the wandering son of someone absent; Medusa, a wronged person portrayed as a mankiller; Cerberus, a beastly guardian intent on being a “good” boy― these poems are punky, preachy, prissy, and pink-collar, and all help create the fever-dream that is Orders of Service.

By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

Ed Madden's newest collection explores growing up queer in the fundamentalist South.

Selected by Timothy Liu for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Madden's mastery of the American lyric combines intellect, heart, and courage as he explores growing up queer in the rural fundamentalist South. The poems anatomize a society of shaming and shunning under the guise of love, fighting free to the theme of finding where we belong. The poems work deep into the linguistic textures of his subjects, from queer love to the loss of a parent. The figure of the pooka (or puca) haunts the pages, embodying both good and bad luck, sorrow and hope.

By Marla Taviano, 2022 Paperback, Poetry

For those of us who are picking up pieces of life and faith and figuring out how to heal and move forward, jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination is a collection of poems—short, thoughtful, brave, and spicy—about getting stuff off our chests. Covering topics like evangelical scare tactics, sex and purity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and how the church treats the queer community, these poems say more in fewer words and with zero sugar-coating. With an appendix jam-packed with books to read on your journey, this is a book that will open you up and take you forward. Warning: you might not be able to put it down.

After author Marla Taviano wrote unbelieve, a book of poems chronicling her faith deconstruction, her plan was to move on from white evangelical Christianity to bigger, lovelier, more all-embracing thoughts. But she couldn’t do it. Why? Because she was still jaded—and knew there was work left to do.

Jaded is this former good Christian girl’s offering—a labor of anger and love. We might not need to stay here forever, but we need this now.

By: David Ly (Editor), Daniel Zomparelli (Editor), 2023, Paperback

The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons.

 In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems—the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past—relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster?

Contributors include Amber Dawn, David Demchuk, Hiromi Goto, jaye simpson, Eddy Boudel Tan, and Kai Cheng Thom.

By Ed Madden, 2023, paperback

A Story of the City: Poems Occasional and Otherwise

When Ed Madden was named poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina, in 2015, he became the first city laureate in the state of South Carolina. During his two terms as city laureate, Madden documented the life and history of the city. He engaged the community by making poetry a public art, posting poems on city buses, sidewalks, movie screens, coffee sleeves, restaurant menus, and faux parking tickets distributed in downtown Columbia one bright and sunny April Fool's Day. While these poems are about a specific city, they ring true for almost any Southern city-maybe any city in America-with its ceremonial occasions and its natural disasters, its misleading public monuments and its protest marches, and its inevitably complex histories. His post officially began with a commemoration of the historic burning of Columbia during the American Civil War and ended with the selection of a new city flag. This collection spans either years of ceremony and controversy, an eclipse and a pandemic, welcomes and elegies, history and hope.

By: Brittany Black Rose Capri (Author), Danez Smith (Foreword), 2018, Paperback

Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

Women’s sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago performance poet and playwright. Currently she is an alumna turned Teaching Artist Fellow at Young Chicago Authors. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, Button Poetry, Seven Scribes, and many other outlets, and anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She is a contributor to Black Nerd Problems, a Pink Door Retreat Fellow, and a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers Award Recipient.