Book picks similar to
Whatever You Desire: A Book Of Lesbian Poetry by Mary Jo Bang
lgbt
poetry
women-gender
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Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ + Culture
Amelia Abraham - 2019
But is same-sex marriage, improved media visibility and corporate endorsement all it’s cracked up to be? At what cost does this acceptance come? And who is getting left behind, particularly in parts of the world where LGBTQ+ rights aren’t so advanced?Combining intrepid journalism with her own personal experience, Amelia Abraham searches for the answers to these urgent challenges, as well as the broader question of what it means to be queer in 2019. With curiosity, good humour and disarming openness, Amelia takes the reader on a thought-provoking and entertaining journey. Join her as she cries at the first same-sex marriage in Britain, loses herself in the world’s biggest drag convention in L.A., marches at Pride parades across Europe, visits both a transgender model agency and the Anti-Violence Project in New York to understand the extremes of trans life today, parties in the clubs of Turkey’s underground LGBTQ+ scene, and meets a genderless family in progressive Stockholm.
Too Strong to Die
Erin Wade - 2017
Ricky hunts a savage serial killer while trying to provide protection for the headstrong Senator as Christine takes on the task of securing agreements with Mexico to build a wall along the Texas border. The two become embroiled in life and death situations as they battle to keep each other alive. Fast action and romance make this one of the top romantic thrillers of the year.
Would You Rather? A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out
Katie Heaney - 2018
Three years later, a lot changed. For one thing, she met the right girl. Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing that she is gay. She tackles everything from the trials of dating in New York City to the growing pains of her first relationship, from obsessing over Harry Styles (because, actually, he does look a bit like a lesbian) to learning to accept herself all over again. Exploring love and sexuality with her neurotic wit and endearing intimacy, Katie shares the message that it's never too late to find love--or yourself.
We Were Witches
Ariel Gore - 2017
Disgusted by an overabundance of phallocratic narratives and Freytag’s pyramid, she turns to a subcultural canon of resistance and failure. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, it documents the survival of a demonized single mother figuring things out.
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
Mary Oliver - 2004
Whether describing a goosefish stranded at low tide, the feeling of being baptized by the mist from a whale's blowhole, or the ‘connection between soul and landscape’, Oliver invites readers to find themselves and their experiences at the center of her world. In Long Life she also speaks of poets and writers: Wordsworth's ‘whirlwind’ of ‘beauty and strangeness’; Hawthorne's ‘sweet-tempered’ side; and Emerson's belief that ‘a man's inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose’. With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has created a breathtaking volume sure to add to her reputation as ‘one of our very best poets’ (New York Times Book Review).
Roots and Branches: Poetry
Robert Duncan - 1969
The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters––Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov."
Sky Burial
Dana Levin - 2011
Highly recommended."—Library Journal"Intimate and hypnotic."—Ploughshares"Levin has the skilled ear, magnificent tongue, and fierce mind of the truly prophetic."—Rain Taxi"Levin's work is phenomenological; it details how it feels to be an embodied consciousness making its way through the world."—Boston Review"Death is the new and unshakeable lens through which I see," writes Dana Levin about her third book, in which she confronts mortality and loss in subjects ranging from Tibetan Buddhist burial practices to Aztec human sacrifice. Shaped by dreams and "the worms and the gods," these poems are a profound investigation of our inescapable fate. As Louise Glück has said: "Levin's animating fury goes back deeper into our linguistic and philosophic history: to Blake's tiger, to the iron judgments of the Old Testament."They took you in an ambulance even though you were dead,they took youand my sister saidWhy are you saving her if she is dead? shey shey—Curve of sky a crescent blade.Vultures wheeling on thermal parapets, shunyata, void that flays—Yak butter, barley flour and tea: you watch him make the paste.Dana Levin's debut volume In the Surgical Theatre won the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Circus Folk & Village Freaks
Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal - 2018
A texture of swift worldly-wisdom underscores the focus on freaks, but often leaves an invisible message of a reverse lens on the rest of the world. ~Rochelle Potkar, poet and Author of 'Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Tales' Aparna Sanyal Upadhyaya is one of those rare people who are just as funny on the page and in a poem as they are in person. I laughed aloud many times reading about the shenanigans in these charming and quirky twisted tales. - Chandrahas Chaudhary, Author of Arzee the Dwarf and Clouds Meet the beautiful people of the Circus, and the freaks who live in the Village next to them. Mangled, jangled, misunderstood, all find place in the rich tapestry of this book. Siamese twins separate to lose half a heart each, and find snake-man and tiger-taming lovers. A man bitten by a crocodile becomes a God, and a Devadasi woos the entire countryside with her culinary artistry. Fates intertwined lead sometimes to tragedy, sometimes happy summits of fame. A clown finds his place in Hollywood and mute animals break unspeakable chains. A twisted man falls in love with a mirror and a white man is unmade by the Indian sun. In this book are tales for every season and every reason. Tales of human depravity that take innocent lives, and of a murderers’ insanity that follows, a fitting revenge by nature, red in tooth and claw. These stories are told in the form of narrative poems in rhyming couplets. Look inside and you will find, you have been to this Village. Surely, you have been to this Circus too.
Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson - 1992
In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
The Art of Letting Go: Poetry for the Seekers
Sanhita Baruah - 2018
It's for the seekers searching for a new home, for the wanderers leaving their old homes, for the lovers creating a home wherever they are. Sometimes you hold on to what is left, sometimes you just let go to start afresh.
Give Me a God I Can Relate to
Blythe Baird - 2015
In 2014, she represented Chicago as the youngest competitor at the National Poetry Slam. Her work has been published or featured by The Huffington Post, Write Bloody, EverydayFeminism, Button Poetry, Chicago Literati, Banango Street, and Wicked Banshee, among others.
Shells
Craig Arnold - 1999
S. Merwin. The book is an intriguing set of variations on the theme of identity. Arnold plays on the idea of the shell as both the dazzling surface of the self and a hard case that protects the self against the assaults of the world. His poems narrate amatory and culinary misadventures. “Friendships based on food,” Arnold writes, “are rarely stable”—this book is full of wildly unstable and bewitching friendships and other significant relations.
The Inexplicable Survival of a Happily Fallible Child
Gary C. Mele, Jr. - 2018
She is cunning and resilient, but hopelessly devoted to the same destructive family members responsible for the failure of her marriage. Husbandless and pregnant with her third child, Gary's mom manages to take her small stopgap family from living in a car in a beach parking lot to a boarding house where she meets the man who will be the father of her next two children. Evictions and cut utilities force move after move from neighboring towns to different states. As the growing family relocates, neglect and abuse from relatives and family friends shadow the children's lives. The chaotic existence, including the presence of an uncle and step-father in and out of prison and an alcoholic uncle who will not leave, awaken Gary to the realization that his family is not like other families. He begins to question his mother's decisions and disappointment transitions to anger, but a bond remains between Gary and his mom. Even during the worst times, she surprises with a fiercely protective love like when Gary is forced to come out as gay at the age of fourteen. In spite of the unhinged way of living, the family is close. Gary and his younger brothers and sisters have no real friends but each other, and, in spite of her faults, they know their mother loves them deeply. Nothing prepares them for the moment she is taken away.
