Queer Poetry Recommendations
by Evan Allgood
Find all the books below in our collection.
Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul | Ryka Aoki
From the author of Light from Uncommon Stars, Aoki’s debut poetry collection Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul investigates transgender and Asian American womanhood, and the ways in which we show up for each other in times of grief.
A History of My Brief Body | Billy-Ray Belcourt
A genre between poetry, memoir, and essay, A History of My Brief Body is a meditation on queerness, indigeneity, sex, and masculinity in which Belcourt finds himself speaking, with great care, to his grandmother.
Water I Won’t Touch | Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Written while the author was healing from a gender-affirming double mastectomy, Water I Won’t Touch considers safety, family, addiction, pain, and how one’s family has a hand in who you’ll become but it doesn’t set the whole story.
Soft Science | Franny Choi
In an extreme modernization of poetic form, Choi’s poems mimic the structure of computer programming languages in Soft Science, drawing parallels between white perceptions of Asian American femininity and the servitude of robots.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound | Torrin A. Greathouse
Beginning with a rewrite of the story of Medusa, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound wraps the intensity and pain of life as a survivor and as a disabled woman in myth and beauty, pulling no punches and leaving you breathless.
Madness | Sam Sax
Toying with the clinical language of psychiatry and the familiar language of sex, Madness succinctly closes the distance between the imaginary and the reality of mental illness, physical illness, and addiction.
Don’t Call Us Dead: poems | Danez Smith
From imagining an afterlife for Black boys killed by police to considering the truth of their own body in space, Smith builds an astonishing collection of poems on mortality, Blackness, and joy in Don’t Call Us Dead.
Gephyromania | T.C. Tolbert
A study of the spaces in between, Gephyromania (literally an addiction to or obsession with bridges) rejects the binaries of gender, sex, love, and the self, and instead finds itself praising the holy place in which they all meet.
All the Flowers Kneeling | Paul Tran
Playing with form and delighting in language, All the Flowers Kneeling is a stunning debut about surviving sexual assault, healing intergenerational trauma, and acknowledging the pain of both.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds | Ocean Vuong
In his debut full-length collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong tackles nearly all the “big” poetic topics—war, family, memory, grief, love—and does so with the unending grace and patience of a poet over twice his age.
