Trying desperately to want less than what one truly requires — and the goodness that comes from giving up that ghost — is a prominent theme in “Something That May Shock and Discredit You,” Daniel Lavery’s new collection of essays, out Feb. 11.
Conflict is meant to happen. Relationships are strengthened by conflict. What are our capacities to engage with conflict in a way that doesn’t destroy us, but help us better understand each other?
I was in high school when I first saw Staceyann Chin perform, barefoot and incensed. She was fearless in her rage, her sexuality, her eloquence. Now, I feel the same reading her as I felt watching all those years ago — as if I’m being granted permission.
Visit five feminist bookstores across the south east that are creating community building and political organizing space as well as curating feminist literature written by authors from different backgrounds holding often marginalized identities.
Maybe that’s why black women love Toni Morrison. She laid bare the kind of secrets that we barely even whispered to each other, the shames that we buried underneath our quick tongues and sisterhood hugs and fashion slays. She wrote for us, and for that she is ours.
Are you a regular adult human queer person, or have you been the fictional tomboy heroine of a beloved fantasy series this whole time? Only one way to find out.
We stay open, even when our minds are swayed by bitterness and despair, because our queer lives depend on knowing that we don’t have to live like this. We turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
H.D. sometimes had a fraught relationship with her own bisexuality, feeling pulled towards either lesbianism or heterosexuality rather than feeling her queerness as an integrated whole. Reconciling her bisexuality was a creative project for her.
A gut feeling is intuition, sure, but it’s also something that announces HERE is the body, NOW is the body, RIGHT NOW.
It’s June, it’s June, we’re living, it’s June. Do you feel our powers rising with the heat, our stares lengthening with the daylight, our desires coming on like freak lightening?
The line breaks are hard to take. They make the poem feel like a fight: not knowing when to stop, talking over one another, losing your thread, gasping for air through tears.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
You’d be surprised the kind of memories that can be sparked by a simple phrase or even by the look and feel of a book.
Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize-Winning poet and ardent devotee of the natural world throughout her life, has passed away from lymphoma at the age of 83.
“I was going to do a story about trans women arming themselves? And all the edits we got back were like, ‘Can your characters look directly at the reader and quote trans murder statistics from last year?'”
Bestselling author of The Incendiaries is out as bisexual, proud, and giving us big feelings about eyeshadow and representation.
Drive Here and Devastate Me, queer femme author Megan Falley’s fourth collection of poetry, is a love letter to the queer community. We talked with Megan about her writing process, femme invisibility, body politics, and of course, love.