Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.

    A lot can happen between the first sip of coffee and the last taste of whiskey, and this book takes a look at the way a single day can change our outlook on everything from relationships with others, to our relationships with ourselves, and everything in between. Ultimately, coffee days, whiskey nights illustrates that no matter how hopeless we may feel at the end of the day, a new one is only a few hours away.

    When she comes to, she explains that she was on her way to the island, to pray to the Goddess at the temple on the hill. Her name is Ashleigh. She cannot remember anything else. Only one person, local historian and past life regression therapist Andrew Monaghan, understands what this could really mean. He asks his colleague, New Yorker Kathleen Edwards, to fly over to help him with this unusual, and potentially extraordinary case. From the start, it is obvious that the two women share a deep, meaningful, yet troubling connection. But who is Ashleigh, really? And will the dark secrets of her past eventually catch up with her, and cost her the life, and love she has always been searching for?

    In order to help create that community, YA authors David Levithan and Billy Merrell have collected original poems, essays, and stories by young adults in their teens and early 20s. The Full Spectrum includes a variety of writers—gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transitioning, and questioning—on a variety of subjects: coming out, family, friendship, religion/faith, first kisses, break-ups, and many others. This one of a kind collection will, perhaps, help all readers see themselves and the world around them in ways they might never have imagined. We have partnered with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to them.

    Taking time, and specifically the months of the year as an overarching structure, Dimitrov elevates the every day and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, NASA’s golden record to the Ouija board, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” While he navigates darkness and fear, loneliness and guilt, Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy even in despair. There is a determined curiosity about who we are as people and a shameless interest in the idea of hope. These poems are obsessed with everything around us, even the terrible and fraught.

    "Some girls are not made," torrin a. greathouse writes, "but spring from the dirt." Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound--selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry--challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates "buckteeth & ulcer." She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse's poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. "I'm still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral."Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse--elegant, vicious, "a one-girl armageddon" draped in crushed velvet--teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.

    Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the United States and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six story collections and the award-winning novel Bow Grip, and is co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Ivan frequently performs at high schools, universities, and festivals across North America.Rae Spoon is a transgender indie musician whose most recent CD is My Prairie Home, which is also the title of a new National Film Board of Canada documentary about them. Rae's first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2013.

    However, she has never acted on her urges. But a night of drinks and a secret confession to her BFF changes all that. Her friend dares her to toss her inhibitions and take a walk over to the other side and invites her to The Stud Palace—an exclusive woman’s club where women go to indulge their bicurious, bisexual, lesbian fantasies. It’s a four-floored fantasy-freaks playground where the walls drip with lust, and the music pumps out seduction. Once inside, the women find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of seduction as they find the woman they want for their steamy, uninhibited night. The studs—women who don’t shy away from presenting a more masculine presence—of the club are there to cater to every fantasy their clients may desire. And it is inside the walls of The Stud Palace where Octavia is seduced out of her clothes and spends a night of passion with a nameless stud who introduces her to the world of unbridled passion and the joys of girl-on-girl sex.

    And there are stories without transgender characters, but with metaphors and symbolism in their place, genuine expressions of self through such speculative fiction tropes as shapeshifting and programming. Transgender individuals see themselves in transformative characters, those outsiders, before seeing themselves as human protagonists. Those feelings are still valid. But though the stories involve transformation and outsiders, sometimes the change is one of self-realization. This anthology will be a welcome read for those who are ready to transcend gender through the lens of science fiction, fantasy, and other works of imaginative fiction.

    Bodily autonomy and transformation, the importance of negative emotions, unhealthy relationships, and bad situations amidst the staggering and urgent question of how build and nurture meaning, love, and safety in a larger world/society that might not be "fixable."

    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

    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.

    Lana’s music and lyrics evoke images of a saturated Kodachrome photograph, so it would stand to reason that she’d now add “poet” to her artist’s kit. Even without music, her words work their way around you, pulling you into a world that’s not unlike a David Lynch movie.[from barnesandnoble.com]

    In typical Acker fashion, he's including a text exchange with one of Acker's fictional heroines, Janey Smith, along with stories of their friendship and what Acker would think of everything now, today, "as the world begins to burn."

    These stories range from a transgender woman trying an experimental transition medication to young lovers separated through decades and meeting far in their own future. These are stories of machines and magic, love, and self-love.This collection features prose stories by:Cherie Dimaline "The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy," "Red Rooms"Gwen Benaway "Ceremonies for the Dead"David Robertson "Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story," Tales From Big Spirit seriesRichard Van Camp "The Lesser Blessed," "Three Feathers"Mari Kurisato "Celia’s Song," "Bent Box"Nathan Adler "Wrist"Daniel Heath Justice "The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles"Darcie Little Badger "Nkásht íí, The Sea Under Texas"Cleo KeahnaAnd an introduction by Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair "Manitowapow," with a foreword by Grace Dillon "Walking the Clouds".Edited by Hope Nicholson "Moonshot," "The Secret Loves of Geek Girls"