Poetry

By: Jackie Wang (Author), 2021, Paperback

2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY

2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST

Jackie Wang’s magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

By: Anis Mojgani, 2023, Paperback

In his sixth poetry collection, Anis Mojgani’s poems travel closer to what his heart yearns for: a reborn, propelling love that can thrive, a true love of self.The author ventures throughout the book in a vulnerable hunt for a thriving understanding of what tenderness in our world looks like and what it can deliver to us.

The author ventures throughout the book in a vulnerable hunt for a thriving understanding of what tenderness brings in a world at times rife with sorrows. 
Drawing from the simple directness of Kenneth Rexroth’s book of Chinese poem translations and the always-present beauty of Lorca’s voice, Mojgani tumbles into the joys of desire, not just from others, but also unfurls a meditation on how to love whether in the presence of another or when alone


Birthed out of laughter and love, pain and remembrance, these new poems arrived out of a touchless world that has asked us all to navigate the difference between loneliness and alone. In this time Mojgani asks himself: “How do we show up to cup a little bit of ourselves into the soft earth and allow time to play its own part in what of ourselves we farm?” 


The poems here are much like what we put in the earth, ideas planted with hope and an unknowing openness to what might come. Whether we try to pull in tighter on the spools of love’s thread or watch helplessly as the lines lengthen between us, this book is for those of us stumbling or resisting our path to intimacy; a book for those who are ready and running gleefully towards love, those who hadn’t even known the earth under them was breaking until they saw the flowers. Mojgani invites the reader in so that they may take this voyage together.

By: Fatimah Asghar (Author), 2018, Paperback

“A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.”—Booklist
“Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones.”—Elle
“[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker

NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD

an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one.
just in case, I hear her say, just in case.

From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

Praise for If They Come for Us

“In forms both traditional . . . and unorthodox . . . Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible. Most vivid and revelatory are pieces such as ‘Boy,’ whose perspicacious turns and irreverent idiom conjure the rich, jagged textures of a childhood shadowed by loss.”—The New Yorker

“[Asghar’s] debut poetry collection cemented her status as one of the city’s greatest present-day poets. . . . A stunning work of art that tackles place, race, sexuality and violence. These poems—both personal and historical, both celebratory and aggrieved—are unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud.”—Chicago Review of Books

 “Taut lines, vivid language, and searing images range cover to cover. . . . Inventive, sad, gripping, and beautiful.”—Library Journal (starred review)

By: Franny Choi (Author), 2023, Paperback

Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick 

One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022"

A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

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.

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, 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. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also 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 in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.

By: Tony Kushner (Author), 2013, Paperback

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika

By: Tony Kushner (Author), 2017, Paperback

Winner of the 1994 Tony Award for Best Play. In the second part of Tony Kushner's epic, the plague of AIDS worsens, relationships fall apart as new ones form, and unexpected friendships take form.

"PERESTROIKA is not only a stunning resolution of the rending human drama of MILLENIUM APPROACHES, but also a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pantheistically religious in a very American style." —Frank Rich, New York Times

"Playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty and compassionate, furious and incredibly smart … It's impossible to imagine anyone captivated by the beginning not wanting — needing — to go back for the end." —Linda Winer, Newsday

"ANGELS IN AMERICA is a monumental achievement, the work of a defiantly theatrical imagination that has no parallel on television or in the movies. It ennobles Broadway as no other work in recent memory has." —Jeremy Gerard, Variety

"Not since Tennessee Williams has a playwright announced his poetic vision with such authority on the Broadway stage … PERESTROIKA is a masterpiece." —John Lahr, New Yorker

By: Tony Kushner (Author), 2017, Paperback

Winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Winner of the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play. In the first part of Tony Kushner's epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel.

"Daring and dazzling! The most ambitious American play of our time: an epic that ranges from earth to heaven; focuses on politics, sex and religion; transports us to Washington, the Kremlin, the South Bronx, Salt Lake City and Antarctica; deals with Jews, Mormons, WASPs, blacks; switches between realism and fantasy, from the tragedy of AIDS to the camp comedy of drag queens to the death or at least the absconding of God." —Jack Kroll, Newsweek

"A vast miraculous play … provocative, witty and deeply upsetting … a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama …" —Frank Rich, New York Times

"Something rare, dangerous and harrowing … a roman candle hurled into a drawing room …" —Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard

"An epic theatrical fever dream … a three-hour cliffhanger that leaves you wanting more." —Variety

"A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." —John Lahr, New Yorker

"Establishes Kushner as a poet and moral visionary in love with the theater yet awake in the world." —Don Shewey, Village Voice

By: Danez Smith (Author), 2017, Paperback

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America―“Dear White America”―where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

By: K.G. Strayer (Author), 2024, Paperback

Stellar Nursery follows trans/nonbinary poet and artist K.G. Strayer's struggle for bodily autonomy. From abortion to top surgery, colliding galaxies to cellular division, Strayer's lyric prose explores what it means to move through the modern world in a contentious body.

The state-mandated "counseling" packet Strayer receives a week before their abortion in 2014 describes the embryo in relation to coins-the height of a nickel, the diameter of a dime. Meant to make them picture holding it in their hands. Instead, Strayer's imagination conjures a whole galaxy in its place-a star being born.

Years later in 2022, Roe V. Wade is overturned. The decision is a catalyst that sets in motion explosive consequences in Strayer's personal life, and their access to life-saving top surgery hangs in the balance.

Strayer's memoir is a heartfelt account of the layered ways our struggles against fascism converge in the context of lived experience.

To meet the world fully embodied-is that a choice we can all make equally?

By: Rob Sanders (Author), Harry Woodgate (Illustrator), 2024, Hardcover

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.