The Perfect Queer Poem: For Making an Altar
“Corpse Flower” gathers those petals, each one placed on the altar as every word is placed in the poem. The sweetness of a petal curling up to touch itself.
The Perfect Queer Poem: For a Stone Sensibility
Bishop wrote seventeen drafts of this poem, so that’s one hundred and thirty six iterations of master and disaster. The losses pile up in a life, and each time you survive them, you have proven to yourself you can withstand more.
Things I Read That I Love #289: Your Body Turns Off The Gas If You Stop Paying Your Bills.
Topics include Law & Order, LA bookstores, podcasts, Jared’s Galleria of Jewelry, Barilla pasta, the millionaire hermit, the stolen kids of Sarah Lawrence and so much more!
Lez Liberty Lit Would Rather Have Friends Than Grammar
“You can have friends or you can correct people’s grammar.” Plus poems about soft bodies on a planet in peril, an argument for binge reading and more.
8 Summer Affair Books featuring Lesbian and Bisexual Women
Eight books with steamy summer affairs between women, with some settings abroad to boot!
The Perfect Queer Poem: When You Need to Break Up With Your Lover Who Is Also Your Best Friend
So much of what we might think of as queer lyric poetry comes is set by Sappho’s example: her attempts to speak her desire so emphatically that it wills love into existence.
Cherríe Moraga on Delving Into Her Queer Chicana Memories in “Native Country of the Heart”
Moraga’s latest, “Native Country of the Heart,” is a deep meditation on memory — reflections of the past, recalling hard moments, losing ourselves, and remembering who we are as Mexican-Americans, in more ways than one. She spoke to Autostraddle about her new book and the journey her queer feminism has taken over the course of her career.
Things I Read That I Love #288: They Emerged To Twist Thirst From A Cloying Wish Into Full-Bodied Desire
Topics include Ramona Quimby, female thirst, dentistry, Christian Moms who make money selling printables on their blogs, murderabilia, women outside, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and more!
Lez Liberty Lit Is Under, and Lost
Carmen Maria Machado, writers’ roles in addressing climate change, why you don’t need to publish a book by 30, a liberated Cinderella, and more!
8 Crime Books Featuring Women Loving Women & Other Queer People
These awesome eight crime books, including mysteries, thrillers, and true crime, all feature queer women!
How I Let Queer Literature Come Out to my Middle School Students for Me
Middle school is weird. It was awkward as hell when I was a hormonal, monstrous, uncertain twelve-year-old, and only slightly less so when I went back to teach English. So when I found myself, a 23-year-old rookie teacher, standing in a cafeteria fielding a question about how lesbian sex works from a seventh grader, I can’t say I had any right to be surprised.
18 Books that Are Queer, Feminist or Otherwise Rad Retellings of Classics
Madeline Miller’s Circe was one of the most talked-about books of the year in 2018, and there’s a reason that we all love queer girl revisionings like Malinda Lo’s queer lit contemporary classic Ash. In that vein, here are 18 books that look at classic tales from a new point of view.
Things I Read That I Love #287: It’s Cool How Gay Sex and Stealing Became Twinned Deviances.
Topics include ice cream, Rosie O’Donnell, the summer of scam, freestyle halfpipe skiing, the capitalist takeover of higher education, JT Leroy, marriage, Bob Fosse and more!
Lez Liberty Lit Is Cussing Like No One’s Listening
Writing and money, machines learning from our texts (and replicating our power structures), whether books are clutter and more.
8 Awesome Queer Books for the Youth and Tweens in Your Life
LGBT fiction for the tween / young teen in your life, or for anyone who likes a good queer book (spoiler: that’s everyone).
Things I Read That I Love #286: It Was That Time Where Everyone Wanted To Be Edgy
Topics include kayaking in Alaska, taking Amtrak across the U.S., Queer Teen Stars, Cathy, Lindy West, frequent flyer mile obsessives, calories, the professional poet and more!
Lez Liberty Lit Is Checking Out These Hot Literary Rivalries
Getting real about the financial realities of writing, creative forces of subculture, K-pop, the branded ephemera of Frida Khalo, and shedding books to survive academia.
20 New Books by or About Queer Women to Read This Spring
Here are 20 novels, YA titles, memoirs, poetry collections, and more that we think you’ll absolutely love. What are you excited about reading this spring?
Things I Read That I Love #285: A Person Who Refuses To Try Something Better Is a Person Who Will Never Make Something Good
Topics include rats, being awake during surgery, defining disability, aerial skiing, a deranged mayor in late-90s Connecticut, Luke Perry, college admissions, Fox News, Outdoor Voices and so much more!
Tomboys of Literature: An Incomplete Survey
A subjective beginning exploration into the far-reaching but inconsistent landscape of literary tomboys.