This Is My Coming Out Poem
This Is My Coming Out Poem

Author: Jax King

Publisher: FriesenPress

Published: 2022-01-17

Total Pages: 71

ISBN-13: 103912335X

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Poetry is one of the best instruments for self-expression, and Jax King, a young non-binary author in search of their authentic self, plays that instrument beautifully. This Is My Coming Out Poem is a collection of poetry focused on queer identity, love and heartbreak, personal growth, mental illness, and gender transition—with an emphasis on ideas, rather than imagery. “Maybe sometimes / You have to lose yourself completely / Before you can be found”—from Jax’s poem “Identity.” Rendered in twenty-five poems of varying length, each is evocative of the intelligence, creativity, and humor of the author, as suggested by these titles: “My Depression: The Amazing Rational Parrot” “My Body Is Not My Friend” “Bong Hits and Tinder Swipes” “The Four Rules of Gun Safety” “To the Man Who Works at Jiffy Lube” “A Survival Guide for the College Queer on Winter Break” This book will be of interest to readers of queer literature, aged mid-teen and up. LGBTQ+ folks, young adults, and fellow poets going through a difficult time, navigating the additional stresses of queer youth, perhaps even contemplating suicide, may particularly find themselves reflected in these poems, as they search for their own authentic self.

The Backwater Sermons
The Backwater Sermons

Author: Jay Hulme

Publisher: Canterbury Press

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1786223953

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Jay Hulme is an award-winning transgender poet, performer, educator and speaker. In late 2019, his fascination with old church buildings turned into a life-changing encounter with the God he had never believed in, and he was baptised in the Anglican church. In this new poetry collection, Jay details his journey through faith and baptism during an unprecedented world-wide pandemic. As he finds God in the ruined factories and polluted canals of his home city, Jonah is heckled over etymology, angels appear in tube stations, and Jesus sits atop a multi-story car park. Cathedrals are trans, trans people are cathedrals, and amidst it all God reaches out to meet us exactly where we are. Jay’s poetry explores belief in the modern world and offers a perspective on queer faith that will appeal not only to Christians, but young members of the LGBT+ community who are interested in faith but unsure of where to start.

Bringing the Shovel Down
Bringing the Shovel Down

Author: Ross Gay

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2011-01-23

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 0822991195

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Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

Breakfast with Thom Gunn
Breakfast with Thom Gunn

Author: Randall Mann

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 0226503453

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Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot’s boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark— and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. Randall Mann’s Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929–2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is “pitiless,” the trees “thin and bloodless,” the words “like the icy water” of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the “graceful erosion” of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunnis at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal. Praise for Complaint in the Garden “We have before us a skillful, witty, passionate young poet. . . . Randall Mann is both attuned to and at odds with the natural world; he articulates the passions and predicaments of a self inside a massive, arousing, but sometimes brutal culture. And he accomplishes these things with buoyant lyric sensibilities and rejuvenating skills.”—Kenyon Review

Nature Poem
Nature Poem

Author: Tommy Pico

Publisher: Tin House Books

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 1941040640

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A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Newspaper Blackout
Newspaper Blackout

Author: Austin Kleon

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0061989940

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Poet and cartoonist Austin Kleon has discovered a new way to read between the lines. Armed with a daily newspaper and a permanent marker, he constructs through deconstruction—eliminating the words he doesn't need to create a new art form: Newspaper Blackout poetry. Highly original, Kleon's verse ranges from provocative to lighthearted, and from moving to hysterically funny, and undoubtedly entertaining. The latest creations in a long history of "found art," Newspaper Blackout will challenge you to find new meaning in the familiar and inspiration from the mundane. Newspaper Blackout contains original poems by Austin Kleon, as well as submissions from readers of Kleon's popular online blog and a handy appendix on how to create your own blackout poetry.

Look We Have Coming to Dover!
Look We Have Coming to Dover!

Author: Daljit Nagra

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2010-12-09

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 0571263917

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Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the most acclaimed debut collection of poetry published in recent years, as well as one of the most relevant and accessible. Nagra, whose own parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, draws on both English and Indian-English traditions to tell stories of alienation, assimilation, aspiration and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.

Eat This Poem
Eat This Poem

Author: Nicole Gulotta

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0834840650

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A literary cookbook that celebrates food and poetry, two of life's essential ingredients. In the same way that salt seasons ingredients to bring out their flavors, poetry seasons our lives; when celebrated together, our everyday moments and meals are richer and more meaningful. The twenty-five inspiring poems in this book—from such poets as Marge Piercy, Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield—are accompanied by seventy-five recipes that bring the richness of words to life in our kitchen, on our plate, and through our palate. Eat This Poem opens us up to fresh ways of accessing poetry and lends new meaning to the foods we cook.

The Book of (More) Delights
The Book of (More) Delights

Author: Ross Gay

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1643755471

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From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

The Poet X
The Poet X

Author: Elizabeth Acevedo

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0062662821

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Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent. “Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation “An incredibly potent debut.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost “Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street This young adult novel, a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List, is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 6 to 8. Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land!