100 Queer Poems

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Pasaribu though, said the last thing they’d do is worry “about how hetero people see me or my writing.

They hope that people reading the book will “understand that queerness is not a discrete sexual category separate from everything else, but something that changes colour and texture in relation to history, economics, nationhood, geography”. Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. It deserves a place on the shelf of every reader keen to discover and rediscover how queer poets speak to one another across the generations.

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Jay Bernard, whose first poetry collection Surge was based on the New Cross fire archives and won the Ted Hughes award, said 100 Queer Poems was “coming at a critical, contradictory juncture: widespread hatred and distrust of trans people alongside huge efforts at representation and inclusion; general acceptance of cis gay and bisexual people yet rising intolerance post-Brexit; an increasingly vocal and visible intersex population, yet few legal rights or protections for them”. Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard.

These poems are harrowing and harsh, funny and furious and unsettling and beautiful. They feel so much and make you, in turn, feel exposed and raw and understood and hopeful.Three months before he was born the Romanian dictator and his wife were executed before a firing squad. To this day his mother still talks about it. This is. a queer poetry collection about bodies and minds and connections and traumas. There’s an experimentation and playfulness with language here that gives experiences a different kind of volume. Queerness and religion, the way in which these two interact, wage war, and cause heartache when mixed — this is all felt with both deep sorrow and a flighty wit in this, one of the most important queer poetry collections ever written. The other thing the introductions note is 100 Queer Poems is the first anthology of it kind put out by a Big However Many It Is Now (4? 5?) publishing for four decades. I suspect the previous text it’s referencing is The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, a collection with a very, very different approach, that feels as rooted in its time as Sappho does in hers. In this context, then, the release of 100 Queer Poems feels long overdue: it is modern, expansive, disruptive and diverse in ways that The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse simply … uh isn’t (although it might well have been at the time). The poem asks a number of questions, says Bernard: “What has passed away and what will transpire? Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?”

Vuong’s second poetry collection, Time Is A Mother, was written after the death of his mother. It’s a collection about love, family, queerness, modern American life, and many other topics.

These are relatable experiences but the way that Jason digests and expels them gives them a new light, and a possible new way for you to understand them. Ocean Vuong is arguably one of the most famous, beloved, and impactful poetry writing today, especially within the queer community.