Poetry / Gay & Lesbian

Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything—or anyone—behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it ...

Winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry retrovirology oscillates between Queer childhood erasure and the AIDS epidemic, pulling from the ACT UP oral history project, informal interviews with survivors, and AIDS historians Sarah Schulman and David France. While some poems elegize key figures of AIDS history such as Larry ...

A New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2024 Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the ...

Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of the poet’s mother and how Smith, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose ...

Finalist, 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry Prelude delineates the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood of Catherine of Siena, a Catholic saint who lived in 1300s Italy and disobeyed her parents by refusing marriage to devote her life to God. Through a historical lens, Brynne ...

Winner, Cave Canem Poetry Prize | Winner, 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry | Winner, 2022 Georgia Author of the Year (Poetry) | Finalist, 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie’s stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, ...

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent ...

A tour de force, Aaron Smith’s fourth collection of poetry, The Book of Daniel, resists the easy satisfactions of Beauty while managing the contemporary entanglements of art, sex, and grief. Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning, these poems depict not only the complications of representation in the ...

In ancient fertility carvings, artists would drill holes into the woman’s body to signify penetrability, which is the basis of Autobiography of a Wound: allowing those wounds and puncture marks to speak through the fertility figures. The wounds are chronicled through letters and poems addressed to F (F stands ...

In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief? Smith’s poetry explores that inexplicable ...

In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The ...

Read “a collection of poems you will want to take with you, everywhere you go” (Indiana Review) by the 2013 inaugural poet for President Barack Obama. Family continues to be a wellspring of inspiration and learning for Blanco. His third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, is a genealogy ...