Build Yourself a Boat


Camonghne Felix - 2019
    This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.Build Yourself a Boat, an innovative debut by award-winning poet Camonghne Felix, interrogates generational trauma, the possibility of healing, and the messiness of survival.Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems


J.D. McClatchy - 2001
    H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

Disintegrate/Dissociate


Arielle Twist - 2019
    In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.

Shifting Bone


Alison Malee - 2016
    This collection speaks of one's aching for the unknown, the desperate need to become known to ourselves, and just how healing love can be. Alison Malee writes of love, heartache, and healing with a truthful and delicate touch.This collection is for anyone who has ever felt lost and for those who were triumphant in finding themselves along the way.

The Summer of Dead Birds


Ali Liebegott - 2019
    But these unpretentious vignettes are laced with compassion, as she learns to balance the sting of death with the tender strangeness of life.

Nature Poem


Tommy Pico - 2017
    For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

All The Things We Never Said


Yasmin Rahman - 2019
    So she joins MementoMori, a website that matches people with partners and allocates them a date and method of death, 'the pact'. Mehreen is paired with Cara Saunders and Olivia Castleton, two strangers dealing with their own serious issues. As they secretly meet over the coming days, Mehreen develops a strong bond with Cara and Olivia, the only people who seem to understand what she's going through. But ironically, the thing that brought them together to commit suicide has also created a mutually supportive friendship that makes them realise that, with the right help, life is worth living. It's not long before all three want out of the pact. But in a terrifying twist of fate, the website won't let them stop, and an increasingly sinister game begins, with MementoMori playing the girls off against each other. A pact is a pact, after all. In this powerful debut written in three points of view, Yasmin Rahman has created a moving, poignant novel celebrating life. ALL THE THINGS WE NEVER SAID is about friendship, strength and survival.

Punk and Zen


J.D. Glass - 2007
    That? She saves for music, whether she's playing guitar or DJing...and everyone dances to her tune. But when the dreams Nina works so hard for start to fall into place, the past she thinks she's left behind returns. As she opens herself - to everything - Nina learns that being punk alone is not enough. She needs to love and be loved, to let go - without losing herself. Angst, sex, love, rock - 'Nuff said.

Ache.


Lillian Olson - 2017
    This is a raw and honest personal account of mental illness offered to those looking to consider, to understand or to feel, in some small way, known. Ache is a unique journey that holds strange beauty in its truth.

All The Words I Should Have Said


Rania Naim - 2016
    Rania Naim’s 'All The Words I Should Have Said' is a beautiful, limited edition paperback book that poetically explores the thrills of love, the highs and lows of life, and the challenges of new beginnings.

The Hungry Ghost Festival


Jen Campbell - 2012
    It's about girls praying to The Angel of the North. It's about a mermaid born in the river Tyne. It's about Chinese lanterns, teenagers at the beach, and a family who run a sacred farm. ..You pick my arms up and spread them outso we are matching. Our woollen scarvestouch our noses - catch our breath like cloth balloons. We dig our feet into the soiland stamp down into the very deep. Somewhere below, the river sleeps with a lady screeching. She has arms that could carry boulders to the edge of cliffs. We wait for herto throw us down...' (extract from 'angel metal')"This is an arresting collection from a writer fully in command of an unusual and significant voice.” Anna Woodford“These are poems full of wonder and surprise.. Jen Campbell tells us stories about growing up...; reimagining love, childhood and home in strange and magical ways.” Liz Berry“Jen Campbell opens the doors wide and takes you through to her own fierce world where nothing goes unquestioned. A mixture of strong filmic images and rich language mean that the poems always keep their sense of wonder and strength.” Sarah Salway"The writing is luminous, immediate, and (yes) magical. I imagine she fell in love with words early, spinning them into shining nets to save herself from a kind of drowning. She’s a real poet, in other words." - Marcia Menter

Dead Dad Jokes


Ollie Schminkey - 2021
    There is nothing quiet about Schminkey's debut. Every page is raw, honest and unforgettable. Dead Dad Jokes brings the impact of addiction into crisp focus while also shattering our simplistic TV preconceptions about it. Ollie never lets the reader slip into the easy sadness of cliche - instead they guide us through the realities and contradictions of losing someone you love and of death - reminding us that they need not be one and the same.

The Women Widowed to Themselves


Lora Mathis - 2015
    Lora Mathis' first full-length book of poetry, exploring femininity, mental illness, and regaining autonomy over the body.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch


John Cameron Mitchell - 1998
    In 2001, the mesmerizing film adaptation was released to equally glowing reviews. Brilliantly innovative and oddly endearing, Hedwig and the Angry Inch—inspired by Plato’s Symposium—is the story of “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig Schmidt, the victim of a gruesomely botched sex-change operation, as dazzlingly recounted by Hedwig (née Hansel) herself in the form of a lounge act, backed by the rock band The Angry Inch.