I can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch.Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty. Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human experience. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.Eloquent and meditative in its approach, beauty, here, beyond base expectations of frivolity and superficiality, is conceived of as a thing to recover. Where Things Touch is an exploration of an essential human pleasure, a necessary freedom by which to challenge what we know of ourselves and the world we inhabit.

    Each story has an illustration by an artist identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community. Compiled by Juno Dawson, author of THIS BOOK IS GAY and CLEAN.A celebration of LGBTQ+ talent, PROUD is a thought-provoking, funny, emotional read.Contributors: Steve Antony, Dean Atta, Kate Alizadeh, Fox Benwell, Alex Bertie, Caroline Bird, Fatti Burke, Tanya Byrne, Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Frank Duffy, Simon James Green, Leo Greenfield, Saffa Khan, Karen Lawler, David Levithan, Priyanka Meenakshi, Alice Oseman, Michael Lee Richardson, David Roberts, Cynthia So, Kay Staples, Jessica Vallance, Kristen Van Dam and Kameron White.Following A CHANGE IS GONNA COME, winner of the YA BOOK PRIZE SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2018

    Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars." - Nick Flynn"In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than the divine but at the same time the language and form elevate themselves to the fevered register of desperation. Yes, sure, fine, you would think that a Muslim writing about being a drunk would have to adopt unconventional approaches, but drunkenness in the Islamic literary tradition is a long and time-honored metaphor. For what? Abandonment to God, a cessation of the self--but not so here; no. Here it's real, it's coarse, it's dangerous. The reason we Muslims do not pray for things is that it is similarly dangerous for one to call God's attention onto oneself. But for Kaveh Akbar, whose very name means 'poetry, ' it is a risk every poem takes with gusto. And speaking purely for myself, these poems give me life because 'for so long every step I've taken/ has been from one tongue to another.' Be careful, little brother. God's got His eye on you now." - Kazim Ali

    Using binary code and texts from classics of the English language such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Joshua Whitehead unravels the coded "I" to trace the formation of a colonized self and reclaim representations of Indigenous texts.Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of the Peguis First Nation.

    More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.

    Including drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, personal letters and illustrations as well as prose and poetry by Bukowski, this pictorial and textual biography of the great polemicist also features revelations gleaned from FBI documentation.

    Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.

    Hunter and Van become boyfriends before they're even teenagers, and stay a couple even when adolescence intervenes. But in high school, conflict arises -- mostly because Hunter is much more comfortable with the sex part of sexual identity. As the two boys start to realize that loving someone doesn't guarantee they will always be with you, they find out more about their own identities -- with Hunter striking out on his own while Van begins to understand his own asexuality.In poems that are romantic and poems that are heartbreaking, Vanilla explores all the flavors of the spectrum -- and how romance and love aren't always the same thing.

    Equal parts grim and buoyant, here is an intimate portrait of trauma, family, addiction, and body. What About the Rest of Your Life exposes the harrowing terrain where there is no boundary between love and abuse. Unapologetically raw, Yim reinvents the recovery narrative through an immigrant's lens.PRAISE FOR WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF YOUR LIFE:“So achingly beautiful I want to sing. I want to set things on fire. I want to put this book in your hands and say, ‘Here. You have to read this. Right goddamn now.’” -Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life“Never before has a book made me fall in love so quickly. What About the Rest of Your Life signals a courageous, crucial, and authentic new voice in literature." -Jenny Boully, Book of Beginnings and Endings"Sung Yim has absorbed and chronicled the new unsettled America in a memoir that vibrates with grief as it attempts to uncover the nexus of masked identities in the Midwest. Theirs is the voice of a generation who is left with the pieces of a disassembled culture. What About the Rest of Your Life is a sustained movement of life, its rawness, gaping holes, and found joys."-Re'Lynn Hansen, author of To Some Women I Have Known“Read this book built from dopamine and the hollows of its absence, this book I’m obsessed with. It will gut you and it will refill you." -Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules“This book is fucking brilliant.” -Glenn Taylor, A Hanging at Cinder Bottom“The kind of book that gets you somewhere new, somewhere more honest and shot through with the hard emotion of living. A striking debut.” -T Fleischmann, Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay"Sung Yim has written an enthralling memoir. It's powerful, vulnerable, and deeply pleasurable. It's a harrowing house fire of a book. Everything that Sung Yim burns up with their excellent prose becomes sanctified, gutted, and glorious."-David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

    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.

    Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man, Jean Cocteau, dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years - time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across to the rest of Europe, always trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

    Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.

    While the plot of the book was wildly imaginative, it was also based on the author's own experience as a sex worker in the 1990s and early 2000s, and on her coming out as lesbian.How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn's sophomore book, reveals an even more poignant and personal landscape—the terrain of sex work, queer identity, and survivor pride. This memoir, told in prose and poetry, offers a frank, multifaceted portrait of the author's experiences hustling the streets of Vancouver, and the how those years took away her self-esteem and nearly destroyed her; at the crux of this autobiographical narrative is the tender celebration of poetry and literature, that—as the title suggests—acted as a lifeline during her most pivotal moments.

    Her parents, Ben and Maggie, are devastated. So are their close friends Isobel and Eric.Isobel knows that her decision, taken years ago, not to have her own children vaccinated against measles is to blame for Iris’s deafness. And Ben knows this too. To make matters worse, Isobel is the woman he fell in love with in his twenties – the woman who married his best friend. As he and Maggie start legal proceedings, Isobel’s world begins to unravel.Lizzie Enfield’s compelling new novel explores the hearts and minds of ordinary people as they struggle to come to terms with the choices they’ve made. Acutely observed and utterly gripping, it explores love and loss, guilt and recovery, with humour, honesty and page-turning prose.