If you’re looking to escape reality for a little while, look no further than this year’s absolute bumper crop of queer novels. As late spring and summer literary events are postponed and cancelled, writers are looking for ways to connect virtually with readers and the publishing community – and finding ways to keep their creativity flowing in a difficult time.
This is dedicated to those who are just trying to make it through every day. It’s been gratifying on an almost cellular level to find that the queen mother Audre Lorde can so frequently speak to the times and places in which we find ourselves. Her final book of poetry, “The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance,” is no exception.
We finished reading “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler. At its core, the book is about embracing truth and change, which is especially true now — when our world seems much closer to Butler’s science fiction. We’d love for you to talk to us about it!
One of the biggest lessons of Audre Lorde’s work is the strength of coalitional politics. I need a movement that can hold my anger. I need a movement that can hold my contradictions. I shouldn’t have to qualify my rage when speaking out about injustice.
Come get dystopian and read “Parable of the Sower” with us!
I’m pairing Audre Lorde’s 1984 conversation with James Baldwin and arguably her best-known speech, “The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in hopes of exploring how our power and freedom lie in embracing our differences as the source of our strength.
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.