Poetry collections from LGBTQ+ poets that explore intersectional identities, politics of belonging, and the power of family through powerful verse and imagery.
Titles are alphabetical by author.
Cut to Bloom
While talking back to the colonialism of strict poetic form, this book attempts to disrupt clear definitions and redefine the American identity as one that is constructed more by questions than answers. This book celebrates the self-made, rogue bouquet, the taking of what you were given and transforming it into something you could make a gift of, and examines what needs to be pruned in order to arrive at this transformation.
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom, the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock and others. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Associate Director of DEI at a school in New York City.
Poetry Collection Coming Soon
Bernard Ferguson is working on a collection and this is a selection of their published poems that center around identity and the LGBTQ+ experience.
Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist, and educator whose work has been featured or published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, VICE News, The Paris Review and elsewhere. They’ve taught creative writing in NYC elementary schools, NYU, The New School, Columbia and elsewhere.
dayliGht
Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing. With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.
In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent.
Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the author of dayliGht (MCDxFSG, 2020), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, and works feverishly toward Queer liberation and dismantling white supremacy. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Poet Laureate, a PEN America Emerging Voices Mentor and the awardee of the 2021 Lotus Foundation Prize for poetry.
Fire is Not a Country
In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us.
As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other.
Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and A Tinderbox in Three Acts (BOA Editions, 2022). Her writing appears in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.
