I’m now tempted to believe that Blake himself has sent us Derrick Austin and his remarkable collection, Trouble the Water. At once gospel and troubadour song, these deeply spiritual and expansively erotic poems are lucid, unflinching, urgent. This is an extraordinary debut." —Mary Szybist, winner of the National Book AwardRich in religious and artistic imagery, Trouble the Water is an intriguing exploration of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly where self-hood is in constant flux. These intimate, sensual poems interweave pop culture and history—moving from the Bible through several artistic eras—to interrogate what it means to be, as Austin says, fully human as a “queer, black body” in 21st century America.

    “Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force.” (Maggie Nelson)"Beautiful . . . Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” –New York Times Book ReviewStrobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it?In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys. He charts police raids and riots, posing and passing out—and a chance encounter one restless night that would change his life forever. The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity—a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember.

    In 1962, Williams retitled and expanded The Parade into a full-length play. Both versions of the play are set on the fishing wharves and in the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tell the story of a young playwright named August dealing with his unrequited love for another man. It was produced posthumously in Provincetown in 2006.

    Obsessive, brilliant, linguistically playful—the mesmerizing world of The Boss is as personal as it is distinctly post-9/11. The result is a breathtaking, one-of-a-kind exploration of contemporary American culture, power structures, family life, and ethnic and personal identity.

    New home. New job. New town. She's moved in with her politically-active best friend from university who has promised to find Millie a date before Christmas.  When news that the local head of the council, Nightmare Nightingale, has decided that there will be no Christmas tree in the town centre that year, Millie is quick to pick up a placard and join the protests. After all, what is Christmas without a tree? But Millie soon discovers that Professor Kay Nightingale isn't quite the nightmare she is painted to be.  What will happen when Millie gets closer to Kay? How will she explain the confusing relationship to her friends? And will there be a Christmas tree in the end?

    It is a coming out journey, an exploration of sexuality, femininity, loving, and being loved.

    Not wanting to face a court martial for being gay, he had to live in a world where he had to watch everything he did and said for fear of being outed; and in another world where he was free to be himself. "One of the hardest things for me to reconcile was the fact that I was completely open with my family and friends but faced the very real possibility of being court martialed and going to jail if I was open with my 'work' colleagues." As Reichen explains, "The don't ask don't tell policy is so contradictory to what the Air Force and all the armed forces stand for ... but they force you to lie in order to serve your country." It was the contradictions which led Reichen to leave the Air Force once he completed his commitment. Happenstance brought Reichen to meet a friend at a Los Angeles restaurant where he was approached by the casting director for "The Amazing Race." Reichen believes his military training was extremely helpful in his winning the show's million dollar prize.

    Dani is befriended--against her own better judgment--by a young therapist named Grace Beaumont, who helps Dani make it through the ordeal of bringing the attacker to justice.

    Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

    The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”Let me beas streamlined as my knife when I say this.As cold as my three-pronged fork thatcools the meat even as it steadies it.A pettiness in me was honedin this cutlers’ town, later bombed,in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born therealongside my wedding pattern, could hearthe constant sharpening of kniveslike some children hear the corn in their hometownstalking to them through the wind.The horizon is just the score they breathe throughlike a box of chickensbreathing through a slit.

    In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing.In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these pieces take us to places language doesn't often go. Kemp powerfully stages a series of anonymous encounters, describing the relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure with luminous intensity, while at the same time facing the impossibility of capturing the moments he describes. This is a bold and challenging work, unashamedly sensual and searching. Kemp beautifully counterpoises explicit description with a searing interrogation of the extreme measures taken in the quest for sexual fulfillment.

    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

    Forging a trail that leads into the heart of Morocco, Seven Moves tracks Christine's gradual recognition that no one can ever really know another's soul. Bearing Anshaw's trademark style -funny, hip, and laser-sharp -this is "a tightly told tale that resists the bookmark as well as any thriller" (Chicago Sun-Times). A Reader's Guide is now available.

    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.

    Twenty voices.Endless possibilities.There's the girl who is in love with Holden Caulfield. The boy who wants to be strong who falls for the girl who's convinced she needs to be weak. The girl who writes love songs for a girl she can't have. The two boys teetering on the brink of their first anniversary. And everyone in between.As he did in the highly acclaimed Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan gives us a world of unforgettable voices that readers will want to visit again and again. It's the realm of possibility open to us all - where love, joy, and the stories we tell will linger.