Tag Archives: Gwen Benaway

Changing of the Seasons

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I am staggered these past few weeks about how much can change in, seemingly, the blink of an eye. The world feels so different now than it did mere weeks ago – and yet, since the day I started Books Beyond Binaries, I haven’t missed a scheduled post, so the band plays on.

The last couple of years have been very challenging for me, and in 2019, I began tweeting about celebrating small joys. I’m not a naturally optimistic person, and in times of difficulty, embracing things like Pokémon GO and homemade ice cream has helped more than I’d readily admit. These days, as most days, I’m taking a great deal of solace in books, so I’m grateful to have this space to share.

And share I shall! Today is extremely exciting for me, because I get to introduce you all to BBB’s first repeat contributor! I reached out on Twitter seeking collaborators for this blog, and I am deeply lucky that Jack reached back out to me, and will be contributing her ARC reviews to enrich the content of this space over the coming months!

An image of Jack, a Black queer woman, eyes closed, wearing gold jewellery, and covered in powder-like, colourful paint.

Jack is a queer writer and artist who is completing her English and Cultural studies B. A
at McMaster University. She likes to read psychological thrillers, Afrofuturistic works and
genre-bending memoirs that include Auto-Theory. Also, she enjoys watching films,
writing short stories, drawing and desserts that are sweet, but not too sweet. It is my absolute pleasure to give over my platform to this brilliant reader and writer, and welcome her reviews of forthcoming queer books!

There are two other firsts that I’ll be celebrating in this post, as well: the book birthday of Mia Siegert’s Somebody Told Me: the first traditionally-published novel to feature a bigender protagonist… AND IT’S A YA SUSPENSE NOVEL. I’m hyped!

Last, but not least – if you’ve been following me for a little while, you’ll know that I’m on the planning team for the Festival of Literary Diversity, held each year in Brampton, ON. It is my favourite lit festival on the planet. In light of current events, the FOLD will move online, for free, for the first time ever this year. There are 19 virtual events this year, and all you need to attend – from anywhere in the world – is to register on Eventbrite. There is one event that I’m going to highlight, though, that everyone who reads BBB should attend – both because it’s going to be AWESOME and also because it’s on my BIRTHDAY. The Art of Craft: Trans Brilliance Edition! Organized by the FOLD and Kai Cheng Thom partially in response to the transphobic violence perpetrated by the Toronto Public Library this year, this event features some mind-blowing trans writers and creators: Gwen Benaway, Ali Blythe, Casey Plett, and Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, as well as Kai herself.

Poster for The Art of Craft: Trans Brilliance Edition

Jack’s ARC Review: Broken People, by Sam Lansky

Sam Lansky’s Broken People, a work of fiction with autobiographical undertones, makes a clear distinction between a physical journey and a spiritual quest. His diction is hypnotizing, twisting and twirling until the tale he has woven is all you can think about devouring. The protagonist’s sense of awareness or lack of, drives the story. It’s a work of art that reminds us that, writing is not healing, rather, it is the reflection, the learning and understanding, that leads to healing. Similarly, the main character’s healing process begins when he faces himself in the process of what he has written.


Lansky writes a riveting tale of growing up, of finding your voice and the cyclical nature of healing. Today, we’ve cultivated the unrealistic expectation of achieving all our life goals age thirty, convinced that not meeting this constraint is an act of failure. The reader is implicated in a story of growth, one that comes from understanding one’s experience rather than just experiencing. It’s difficult to articulate what we feel and how that may have led us to act a certain way, but Lansky does it expertly. He creates characters who come to life by simply existing, making choices, breathing.


CW for this book include eating disorders, substance use and partner violence (verbal and emotional). I found myself at certain scenes conflicted, but it was in that space that I was able to acknowledge the nuances of interpersonal relationships. I recommend this book to readers in early adulthood, who are looking for something.

The cover of Broken People, by Sam Lansky, which features a hummingbird.


There are similarities between Sam Lansky the author, and Sam the main character. Broken People references the protagonist as a writer whose memoir explores substance use, which is like the content of Sam Lansky’s previous work The Gilded Razor: a memoir. Sam crafts a journey of love and forgiveness and situates it in a work of fiction.


We meet Sam, a man who seems stuck and the story is full of flashbacks. He is living the dream before the dream: moving in with a friend, dreaming about becoming a published author.


The more he can afford, the emptier Sam feels. We follow Sam through the vulnerability in the wake of sexual encounters, heartbreak and career successes. We become entrenched in what it means to explore one’s love language when loving yourself did not seem to be an option.


I am currently writing a paper where I explore the relationship between the physical body and orientation, of both gender and sexuality. Lansky writes of self-discovery through both the body and the external world. How do you explore the world when you do not feel at home in your own body? How can you escape who you are? He does not answer these questions, rather, he offers possible paths. Lansky explores consumption of relationships, food and substance use. “Your body is a temple”, but what if you don’t know how to praise whom the altar belongs to? What if you don’t know yourself? There is no single cure or quick fix to the struggles of real life, but there is learning, through trial and error. So that is my take-away. Reading Broken People felt like making a home out of a story. It’s a story about the coming of age of the coming of age story.

Broken People is scheduled to be released in June 2020, and is available for pre-order now.

Happy Book Birthday to Somebody Told Me, by Mia Siegert

Yall, it is a weird time to be celebrating a book birthday, but we are here, and it is happening, and I have been waiting for this little gem for a while!

Somebody Told Me is the first novel to be traditionally published featuring bigender representation, and it came out this month from Carolrhoda and is available to buy now. Mia’s described this book as the French film Améie, but if it went terribly wrong… and given that Amélie is a huge favourite of mine, I am so here for this.

The novel follows Russian Jewish protagonist Aleks/Alexis as they navigate gender, and the fallout after they are sexually assaulted in their fandom community. It explores themes of gender presentation as the MC tries to solve a mystery before someone else gets hurt, and in doing so, confront their abuser and their own trauma. It’s not a light and fluffy read, and CWs also include trans and queerphobia, and religious content. That said, this is the kind of nuanced diversity representation that as a reader, I’ve been waiting for, and I would say: don’t sleep on this.

For a taste of what you can expect from this book, check out the book trailer above, voiced by Katelyn Clarke and Zeno Robinson. And while you’re at it, head on over to Mia’s Twitter, where you can check out the this spectacular book look featuring colourways from the bi-coded book cover, and wish a happy book birthday to Somebody Told Me!

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

Queery Me This

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Currently Reading: Tiny Pretty Things, by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton

News

I have a couple of neat resources to share this week, but before I do that, I want to pop in a quick personal note. One of my colleagues at the Rights Factory, Cecilia Lyra, announced her new two-book deal this week! CeCe is a multicultural author originally from Brazil, now living in Canada. She is a brilliant feminist with a background in law, and I love working with her. Her novel The Sunset Sisters was previously published in Germany under the title Sisters for a Summer, where it was a #1 bestseller. The Sunset Sisters will be available digitally in English through Bookouture/Hachette in June! I can’t wait to read her books! If you want to read The Sunset Sisters, please consider pre-ordering an affordable digital copy! If you do so, it will be of most benefit to CeCe, and it will positively influence Amazon’s algorithms – something we should all want to do to support deserving authors.

CeCe Lyra, author of the Sunset Sisters.

Resources

For those of you who have been following the violence toward trans people recently perpetrated by the Toronto Public Library, I want to share THREE resources. The first is an informative thread written by trans Indigenous author Gwen Benaway, linked below, who breaks down 191 pages of internal Emails from the TPL released in a freedom of information request regarding the violent incidents.

The second is a great article by Toronto-based journalist Michael Rancic, who writes about the incident to date, as well as TRANScend TRANSform, the related teach-in that happened last week. If you, like me, weren’t able to attend this event in person (don’t worry – there were over 200 attendees!), the third resource is the high-quality video recording of the event, which was hosted by the bookshop where I work. Shoutout to Anju Gogia from Another Story, and Kai Cheng Thom, for putting in the legwork to make this happen, and to get both a live video stream, and this high quality version, online.

I have also updated my own Links and Resources page with a compilation of all of the information that I have posted about the incidents surrounding transphobia at the TPL for quick reference.

On a lighter note, ReQueered Tales, a re-publisher of post-Stonewall pre-2000 queer literature, posted this great Canadian LGBTQ2S+ history resource: unearthed 1970’s interviews with Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera from CBC Radio.

Last, but not least, Lee and Low Books released the results of their recent Diversity in Publishing survey this past week… and guess what? Surprising no one, we’re still super white. Check out the full blog post here.

Guest Post from Rhynn Bowlick-Evans

Given my recent forays into the publishing business, I’ve been thinking so much about the process of writing and publishing a book for the trade market. This post delves into Rhynn Bowlick-Evans’ intensely personal experience of querying an agent for publication… and ultimately deciding instead to turn their back on the process.

Queery Me This, by Rhynn Bowlick-Evans

I did a lot of research when I started querying a couple years back. I had spreadsheets galore, bookmarked articles with click-batey titles about how to write the perfect pitch, meticulously prepared sample pages, and a deep, oppressive sense of longing.

You see, everything had really gone to shit. My family was crumbling. Posturing as cishet was becoming too exhausting, but my queerness scared me. I’d just finished grad school, which had completely destroyed me. I was stranded on the East Coast with no community, no connections, and no career prospects.

Writing was the light at the end of the tunnel, and as my characters helped pull me back into the real world, I wondered if they might do the same for others who were struggling. Thus, I did what I felt was the only logical thing at the time: I began the disheartening process of querying.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Swing and a Miss

I say it was disheartening, because the things I was searching for were not anything that literary agents could or should replicate.

I knew my word count was too high for a YA Fantasy manuscript. My fantasy of manners-esque style and florid prose didn’t necessarily pitch well, without a high-stakes hook. And yet, knowing this, I queried anyway. My manuscript was #OwnVoices—there was queerness throughout the manuscript that I wasn’t ready to call my own, though, and I couldn’t bring myself to type out the words I was abused, this is my story, which meant it was hard to explain why I should be telling this story, and why others should bother to listen.

At a certain point, the shiny new luster of querying started to wear off. Some of the agents I was lusting after made a questionable tweet (or six), and as I began to follow authors who were represented, it quickly became apparent that being agented was not the be-all, end-all fix. Many still worked day-jobs, and a handful were brutally honest about what it meant to not be the agency’s golden child. And beyond the realities of publishing lay uncomfortable truths about my sense of self—I could not pitch this book without owning the parts of it that belonged to me. And yet, to own those parts—to stand up and say I am hurt, I am queer felt like handing over my trauma a la some twitsted sort of currency to buy marketability, and I was expected to do it in pursuit of love I should’ve been seeking elsewhere.

Authors absolutely must be asking why they’ve chosen to query. Why do they want to be represented? Why do they want to be published, and more than that, why is this method of publishing right for them and their story?

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Here’s the Deal

I got some fantastic feedback from my time querying. I also realized that I was waiting for someone to give me permission to be excited about my work.

At some point, I got it into my head that I needed to earn my own enthusiasm. That, with enough collective approval, I could cash in and start gushing about my project. And let me tell you, friends, it is exhausting, waiting to be excited about something you’re so passionate about.

In a lot of respects, querying was a way of searching for affection that my community wasn’t giving. It was the first step to building a collective that better reflected my interests and passions, that would get excited about the things I loved. And, too, I think the agent search was really a quest to lend some legitimacy to a project even I wasn’t taking seriously at the time—as much time and effort as I put into my manuscript, I still saw it as a cry for help from a desperate person.

Most of my querying was waiting for someone to hand my manuscript back to me and say, Your feelings are so valid, darling, so valid in fact that we must share them with the world. This—and I cannot emphasize this enough—is not an agent’s job.

I wanted someone to tell me that it was all going to be okay. That it was okay that my manuscript was front-loaded with the queer, masc characters like me. It was okay, writing about how difficult it was to maintain connections with people post-trauma, and too, that it was okay to craft a family on paper like the one I wanted in my real life. And above all this, I wanted someone to tell me it was okay to love that manuscript. Because that manuscript still feels like me, and it’s okay to love me. I am loveable.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Contracted Advance

I’ve seen a lot of people saying how 2020 is the year they write what they want. The distinction between marketable and good can, at times, be quite vast, and so it’s good to be aware that the story you love may not be a story that’s selling well right now.

I made a promise to myself, when I started writing. An internal contract that I would write what I needed to, and that this project would never be for anyone but myself. I broke this contract, querying.

I didn’t want to traditionally publish. There’s a lot of reasons why, some practical (retaining rights and control), others, not (I’m impatient and wanted to publish faster than a trad publishing timeline allowed). The most important reason, though, was that trad publishing could not give me self-love. It could not make me come to terms with myself. And it didn’t really matter which publishing avenues I was exploring—if I couldn’t find self-acceptance, it would be a miserable journey, no matter the path.

Intrinsic appreciation of the craft was something that I had to nurture. It’s a balance between writing for yourself and still being able to work with readers and editors, all while retaining confidence in your work. And really, it comes back the the interminable question every good writer should be asking, the one thing we all must wonder to spin the narratives: but why?

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

How I Learned I Love Thrillers

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Currently Reading: Privilege, by Mary Adkins

News

CW: violence against trans women, transphobia, murder

I don’t normally share trans news that’s not book-related, however because this story is local and has touched my community, I want to post a short note that on December 22nd, a local trans woman and activist for trans rights, Julie Berman, was murdered in Toronto. Coming on the heels of transphobic violence being allowed to take place at Toronto Public Libraries, this death feels particularly poignant to me personally as I knew Berman through my work with Re:searching for LGBTQ2S+ Health. One of my colleagues recently described her as smart and sarcastic, beautiful and hilarious.

Selfie of Julie Berman.
Julie Berman

If you are in Toronto, please also keep in mind that the bookshop where I work, Another Story, is co-sponsoring an upcoming teach-in for trans allies featuring incredible trans women speakers Kai Cheng Thom and Gwen Benaway. Click on the image below for details.

A poster for TRANScend/TRANSform. Click the image for the Facebook event.

One last note is that the Emerging Writers reading series in Toronto (recently voted the best reading series in the city) is hosting a trans and non-binary writers event in March. The deadline to submit has been extended to January 22nd! If you are Toronto local or adjacent, and you have not published a book, get in there!

A tweet from @ewreading about their upcoming trans and non-binary Emerging Writers reading event.

Karen McManus and How I Learned I Love Thrillers

In late 2018 and early 2019, I was doing a lot of long distance driving. And I mean long distance. I routinely made the trek from Toronto to Denver, which takes a pretty steady two days on the road, with, in my case, an overnight in Des Moines, Iowa. What that drive means for me, especially when I do it alone or with my dogs, is a lot of audiobooks. I’ve become a Libby expert over the past few years, and I usually listen to most of them at 2x normal speed, especially when I’m on the road and trying to avoid drowsiness.

I have an audiobook routine. A few weeks before the trip, I’ll sit down with Libby, and put a selection of books on hold. Because I know I’ll be listening to the books straight through, I typically pick a type of book that’s a little different than what I might pick were I to spend a couple of days or weeks with a luxurious hardback. I pick things that are a little lighter, a little faster paced, sometimes things that seem extra engaging.

In January of 2019, I was making the drive back to Toronto, and it was a snowy one. It ended up taking me an extra day, because I got caught in a whiteout a few hours outside of London, and one of my dogs was injured. My brain was super foggy, and I had to be on my toes in the nasty weather. I decided to listen to a book that I’d seen on the shop shelves at Another Story, the indie in Toronto where I work. It had caught my eyes a couple of times, and I’d never read a YA thriller as an adult, so I figured it would probably keep me interested, and it would be good research for our teen, educator, and caregiver customers. The book was One of Us is Lying, by Karen M. McManus.

The cover of One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus, which shows four teens' photos, each with the face covered in lined paper. The title is written in red marker across the photos.

This book was McManus’ debut novel. A bunch of things about it surprised me. It felt raw. It felt more graphic than I had expected for a book written for teens. It felt just a little bit kitschy, in a way that I couldn’t decide if I liked or not. And also? It totally had me hooked. I listened to the whole thing. I wasn’t the only one who liked McManus’ work. At the end of 2019, this title had spent 100 weeks on the NYT bestseller list.

A tweet from Karen McManus, celebrating the 100th week on the NYT Bestseller List for One of Us is Lying.

I had a rough 2019, as so many people did. About halfway through the year, after going through a lot of ups and downs with my psychiatric disabilities, some of my personal struggles had come to a head, and I was having trouble focusing on anything – least of all, books. I looked back at what I had read throughout the year, and I thought back to McManus’ book, and I thought… she has another title, right? I listened to it on audio again, and truth be told? I liked it a lot more than her first book.

The cover of Two Can Keep A Secret, which is reminiscent of the cover of One of Us is Lying.

I originally thought that this was the sequel to One of Us is Lying, but it quickly became obvious that I was mistaken. I stuck with it, and was pleasantly surprised. I had been reading a lot of spooky stories and YA horror through the first half of 2019, and the amusement park in a small town setting struck a gothic chord with me that high school detention had missed in McManus’ first book. The characters were richer, and the story took more twists and turns.

As 2019 progressed, I decided to embrace the small joys that I was experiencing. I leaned hard in whenever something made me happy. I collected Pokémon cards and started playing PoGo after the release of the nostalgic and charming Detective Pikachu. My partner and I bought an ice cream maker, and a book called *Incredible Vegan Ice Cream* by Deena Jalal, and we made (and ate) so much inexpensive ice cream. And when I realized that teen thrillers were the kinds of books that I could read quickly, and that would suck me in and distract me from the rest of the world? Well.

Some of the YA and NA thrillers that I read in 2019.

I read a bunch of them. Some of them speculative, and others just good old fashioned thrillers. I don’t really read books written by white cis men very often, so most of them had female authors… and the best ones had tonnes of plot twists. I started reading adult thrillers, with a particular interest in queer, feminist, domestic, psychological, and gothic novels. And soon, I realized that, whatever it says about me… murder is my comfort read.

These realizations completely changed and shaped my reading for the rest of the year. From realizing that this unsettling genre was my wheelhouse, my TBR swelled, I burned through so many fantastic and entertaining reads, I processed emotions, I made friends, and I discovered new authors who I had never considered picking up before.

During the #VillainAThon, a Halloween reading challenge I participated in this year, I crossed paths with Jennifer Donaldson and L. E. Flynn on Twitter, after being positively blown away by their books. They are both incredibly skilled female writers, and a pleasure to know. At the time, Flynn recommended Kara Thomas’ books to me, which I got from the library as quickly as I could, and gobbled them up. I’m so excited for Thomas’ book The Cheerleaders, which was the last hold to arrive, and for Flynn’s forthcoming title, All Eyes on Her.

I also discovered some mainstream adult authors who I honestly never thought I would enjoy. I admit, I’d seen these women on the shelves at the bookstore where I work, and I had written them off as likely too normative for my tastes. What can I say? Sometimes I just call it wrong. In the last few months of 2019, I have read three of Liane Moriarty’s books, and two of Ruth Ware’s, and I guarantee that the rest of the titles that these two authors have produced are high up on my list for 2020 reading. Not that they need my endorsement, but Big Little Lies, and in particular The Death of Mrs. Westaway were fantastic, and the latter quickly made it onto my favourites’ list.

Five of the books that I read in 2019 by Ruth Ware and Liane Moriarty.

So… that brings me back to Karen McManus. I was lucky enough to get an ARC of One of Us is Next, the actual sequel to One of Us is Lying, by @PenguinTeenCA earlier this year. Looking at McManus’ progression from her debut to her third book, the difference is staggering. This sequel takes place among the younger siblings and friends of the cast of her first book – a more diverse, nuanced cast, and a story that’s more tangled and engaging than before. It’s not surprising that McManus is now an international and NYT bestselling author, with yet another book on the docket following the January release of One of Us is Next. And I have her to thank for not only shaping my reading this past year, but also to opening my mind to a whole genre of literature that reflects my experiences and emotions in unexpected ways.

The cover of One of Us is Next, also reminiscent of McManus' previous books.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!

A strip of film showing images of screaming faces and ghostly figures.

Guest Post: Poetry from a Former Skeptic

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Currently Reading: A Madness of Sunshine, by Nalini Singh

This week, I am extraordinarily grateful to Beck Andoff, for providing me with a FANTASTIC guest post on a topic that I have neglected in my previous posts: poetry! I don’t read enough poetry, and I certainly don’t give it the coverage it deserves in this blog, so I’m glad that when I asked for a post from a fellow Toronto indie bookseller, this is what I got!

Andoff is somewhat of a local celebrity, and someone who I very much look up to in my local indie bookshop world, who can sometimes be heard sharing their book recommendations on Metro Morning!

Beck is a cheerful, messy queer whose gender could best be described as HIM from Powerpuff Girls. Too much gender for one tired anxious depressive body. Beck manages two locations of Type Books in Toronto, reads a lot of pop culture crit and micro histories, and lives with Bill Pullman the malamute mutt.

I’m honoured to host this guest post and share their poetry recommendations in this space!

From Beck: Queer Poetry

The Gay Agenda is just about getting you to read poetry.

Once upon a time, I loved being that smug 20 year old jerk who dismissed poetry as boring. I was yucking people’s yum left, right, and centre. In the years of bookstore experience I had before I worked at Type, I never ONCE handsold a poetry book.

But then, one day this past fall, The Queers got me. They caught me with the simplest little poem in the teeniest prettiest little book (Sennah Yee’s How Do I Look), and made me realize that poetry could be irreverent and current and kind of ridiculous and still have bite to it. The year since then has been an excited process of discovering just how much of a contrary fool I was to be missing all this for a decade. So here’s a little list of my fledgling queer poetry collection recommendations from someone who hasn’t a fuckin clue how to talk about poetry.

The covers of Holy Wild, Hera Lindsay Bird, and Don’t Call Us Dead

Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway

Wow. Gwen is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent (and a hero of the trans/NB/GNC community here in Toronto right now), and this poetry collection ACHES. It’s righteous and exhausted and graceful and very, very real. And tremendously readable for something that deals with some incredibly painful subjects. Take your time with this one, and watch her work forever.

Hera Lindsay Bird by Hera Lindsay Bird

This miserable joyous snarky work by bisexual New Zealander Hera Lindsay Bird fully embraces rooting her pieces in time with frequent absurd references to pop culture, like the poem MONICA… which is about Monica from Friends. She also just has some of the best titles in the game: KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND, WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD, BRUCE WILLIS YOU ARE THE GHOST.

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Danez Smith is often one of the best things about my twitter newsfeed— their recent (joke) thread about top privilege was a thing of beauty (I caught myself literally saying to someone “it’s funny because it’s true!”). Their poetry’s really tremendous. Not an easy read for me— fragmented and abstract, plays with form— but very worth it. a note on Vaseline is one that burned its way into my heart and brain.

The covers of How Do I Look and NDN Coping Mechanisms

How Do I Look by Sennah Yee

Every one of these itsy-bitsy poems was a precious lil jewel of delight for my soul. Irreverent and goofy and artful and specific. I am endlessly tempted to get the whole of the poem My Type tattooed on my body.

NDN Coping Mechanisms by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Griffin-winning poet. He tangles longing and gay sex and colonization, and his style is an amazing clash of academic and conversational. And he has a poem titled AND SO I ANAL DOUCHE WHILE KESHA’S ‘PRAYING’ PLAYS FROM MY IPHONE ON REPEAT. Come on. My standard for all poetry now is unflinching reference to the realities of queer sex prep, apparently.

The covers of Lunch Poems and Full Metal Indigiqueer

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

Why had none of my jerk friends never told me Frank O’Hara was queer? Rude. He writes yearning and contentment and wanting to be loved like absolutely no one else, and with precise clarity of language. His poetry often feels like a warm bath. Reading this really makes me wonder if it was fluke that I wasn’t born a white cis gay man writing poetry in the 1960s rather than white genderqueer queer person writing fuck-all at the end of the world.

Full-Metal Indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead

Easily the most high-concept collection on this list. A Two-spirit Ojibwe Cree storyteller and writer (his novel Jonny Appleseed was visceral and RAW and sexy and heartbreaking), this collection uses a kind of scifi-meets-lore conceit, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

This is a list of poets that have captured me (mostly through my coworker Sasha’s amazing recommendations), but it is also the list of someone who has only been dipping their toe into poetry for less than a year. There’s a huge body of amazing queer poetry out in the world, and the right bookstores and libraries will be able to indoctrinate you better than I have.

PS, if you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving me a tip! It only takes a minute, and it allows me to keep creating content just like this, buying food for my pets, and pursuing my career as a literary agent!