Book picks similar to
Anesthesia by Kenny Fries
poetry
disabilitystudies
anesthesia
lgbtq
The Willies
Adam Falkner - 2020
These poems are honest, vulnerable, and unflinching in their ability to look into the speaker's complications. The poems trace the author's childhood, adulthood, and hopeful future, all of them asking the central question of how a person continues to love themselves, even as all they know evolves and vanishes.
Dream
Garrett Leigh - 2018
It’s a place for every fantasy — for crazy-hot encounters — where a night of insane NSA sex brings relief to Dylan’s fragile feelings. It should be a perfect escape, and for one magical night it seems that way, but then worlds collide, and reality bites when his hookup desperately needs a friend. Surely Dylan can’t trust his instincts when friendship has bruised his heart so badly before? It’s burying me alive… The deck is stacked against former ballet dancer Angelo Giordano ever finding real love. At least visiting Lovato’s offers respite from a life defined by illness; a glimmer of light in the dull grey of his so-called life without dance. But then he encounters Dylan — a glorious ray of the brightest sunshine — who makes his heart pound once more with purpose. Angelo’s mind is blown by this man, but the disease that ended his career won’t let him bask in new love. He’s drowning, and Dylan can’t save him while insecurities swamp them both. The only way to make it means confronting their demons. If Dylan can turn his back on the past, and Angelo can face his uncertain future, maybe they can chase their dreams together.Standalone. 60000 words. First in the electric new series from bestselling author Garrett Leigh.
Love, Or Something Like Love
O Thiam Chin - 2013
A band of swordsmen on a failed mission. The forbidden love of Zheng He, the great Chinese Admiral. A young daughter forming a strange bond with her deceased father’s cat. Presenting ten stories in his fifth collection, O Thiam Chin plumbs the joy and despair, hopes and fears of men and women caught up by their past and confounded by lost loves. Taut, dark and visceral, these stories reveal, once again, the mysteries that lie in the heart of man.
A Matter of Life and Sex
Oscar Moore - 1992
From the stirrings of his adolescent libido to his eventual death from AIDS, Oscar Moore's hero confronts his destiny with raw candour, shocking self-awareness, and frightening fatalism.
City of God
Gil Cuadros - 1994
From the body’s first mysterious eroticism to its final humiliation and pain, Gil Cuadros gives voice to both the beauty and sorrow of our common fate. His writing cuts like a double-edged sword—at times artful and sharp, at times unfiltered and raw. This is an awesome and haunting book.”—David Trinidad“The sensual, the expressive, the daring, the transformed become the matryrs of every era, every family. Their memoirs, heroics are our most devastating works of art. Gil Cuadros’s story ‘Unprotected’ is a classic of AIDS fiction and deserves a place of honor in the mosaic of American writing.”—Sarah Schulman“In a voice poised between plainspokenness and urgency, Gil Cuadros writes about the remnants of love in a devastated world. The poems and stories in City of God are as dire as they are beautiful, and sharp as a blow to the body.”—Bernard Cooper“I accuse Gil Cuadros of literary seduction in the nth degree…He makes me read on when I want to cry…I do not want to look at his words, and yet I cannot take my eyes away. His images sooth, burn, inspire. I accuse Gil Cuadros of language abuse—his stroke of silk, his pen a bludgeon. I accuse him of heart-bashing.”—Wanda ColemanGil Cuadros published stories and poems in Indivisible, High Risk 2, and Blood Whispers. His work is also on the compact disc, Verdict and the Violence: Poet’s Response to the LA Uprising. He was awarded the 1991 Brody Literature Fellowship, and was one of the first recipients of the PEN Center USA/West grant to writers with HIV. He lived in Los Angeles until his death in 1996.
Anybody: Poems
Ari Banias - 2016
Moving through iconic and imagined landscapes, Anybody confronts the strangeness of being alive and of being a restlessly gendered, queer, emotive body. Wherever the poet turns—the cruising spaces of Fire Island, a city lake, a Greek island, a bodega-turned-coffee-shop—he finds the charge of boundedness and signification, the implications of what it means to be a this instead of a that. Witty, tender, and original, these poems pierce the constructs that define our lives.
There Should Be Flowers
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza - 2016
Here, the body is a fixation-as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. "There is nothing I love more than an honest storm," Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn't need a blurb. It simply needs to be read."-Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Question
David Levithan - 2006
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.
Lonely Planet - Acting Edition
Steven Dietz - 1994
Jody is in his forties and runs a map store. Not one for the outside world, he stays in his store all the time. His friend, Carl is in his late thirties and has been bringing chairs of dead friends into Jody's store and leaving them there. When Jody needs to take an AIDS test, Carl tries to convince him it is not only okay to leave the store, but also that he must take responsibility for his life. If he doesn't, he will join the set of chairs that Carl has taken great pains to place in the right spots around the store. Jody finally leaves the map store to take his HIV test and return to find Carl sitting in a chair of his own. With this gesture, we know that Carl has joined the many of their friends who have died, but now Jody must take Carl's place as the caretaker.
The North Side of the Sun
Alaya Dawn Johnson - 2015
Nameless, but inspired by Elizabethan London, 18th century Paris, 1980s New York, and many others great cities both real and fictional, the setting of Tremontaine comes alive behind the colorful figures of Micah, Rafe Fenton, Ixkaab Balam, and of course: Diane, the Duchess of Tremontaine, a character well-met in the original series, but whose history has remained a mystery until now.
Everybody's Talking About Jamie
Tom MacRae - 2017
Time to make your dreams come true.
Beauty Is Convulsive
Carole Maso - 2002
. . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.
Beyond the Gender Binary
Alok Vaid-Menon - 2020
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.
A Door Behind A Door
Yelena Moskovich - 2021
There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.