Autopsy (Button Poetry)


Donte Collins - 2017
    As the book unfolds, the reader journeys alongside the author through grief and healing. Named the Most Promising Young Poet in the country by the Academy of American Poets, Collins's work has consistently wowed audiences. Autopsy propels that work onto the national stage. In the words of the author, the book is a spring thaw -- the new life alongside the old, the good cry and the release after.

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field


Billy-Ray Belcourt - 2019
    He aims an anthropological eye at the realities of everyday life to show how they house the violence that continues to reverberate from the long twentieth century. In a genre-bending constellation of poetry, photography, redaction, and poetics, Belcourt ultimately argues that if signifiers of Indigenous suffering are everywhere, so too is evidence of Indigenous peoples’ rogue possibility, their utopian drive.In NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, the poet takes on the political demands of queerness, mainstream portrayals of Indigenous life, love and its discontents, and the limits and uses of poetry as a vehicle for Indigenous liberation. In the process, Belcourt once again demonstrates his extraordinary craft, guile, and audacity, and the sheer dexterity of his imagination.

Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics


Bliss Carman - 1904
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Empty Bottles Full of Stories


R.H. Sin - 2019
    Sin and Robert M. Drake. What are you hiding behind your smile? If those empty bottles that line the walls of your room could speak, what tales would they spill? So much of your truth is buried beneath the lies you tell yourself. There’s a need to scream to the moon; there’s this urge to go out into the darkness of the night to purge. There are so many stories living inside your soul, you just want the opportunity to tell them. And when you can’t find the will to express what lives within your heart, these words will give you peace. These words will set you free.

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home


Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2015
    This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry book Love Cake won a Lambda Literary Award.

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.

13th Balloon


Mark Bibbins - 2020
    With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred—amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, "For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say." And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing—through both joy and grief—to wonder.

The Invisible Manuscript


Alfian Sa'at - 2012
    Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, will shock and devestate. Here is an uncompromising confluence of unfulfilled desires wrought through language by one of Singapore's most outspoken and critical voices.