June is Pride Month, and BOA Editions is proud to celebrate the many diverse voices of the LGBT community! Here are six poetry collections plus one short story collection by some of our favorite gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer authors.
Beautiful in the Mouth by Keetje Kuipers
In her prize-winning debut collection, queer poet Keetje Kuipers blends eroticism, longing, memory, and the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains into a sensual, unforgettable landscape. Kuipers' poems are inhabited by the echoes of those she has loved: their presence read in tea leaves, found under the stairwells of Brooklyn brownstones, reconstructed in verse as though molded from clay.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
“I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be,” Chen Chen writes in his critically acclaimed debut: "I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers.” When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities charts a new path that embraces the pain and the joy of living true to one's intersecting identities.
Fanny Says by Nickole Brown
“You ain't a lesbian, are you?" asks Frances "Fanny" Lee Cox in Nickole Brown's book-length love song to her late grandmother, the eponymous Fanny Says. Brown captures her grandmother's larger-than-life spirit in Fanny's own words: sometimes funny, sometimes bawdy, often poignant as these poems wrestle with the twin griefs of losing a beloved family member and the deep pain of generational prejudices.
Trouble the Water by Derrick Austin
Vivid and erotic, Trouble the Water teems with praise for the lover and the richness of the world, spoken in a voice which is “velvet, sovereign, black.” With references to Beyoncé, St. Sebastian, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the experimental films of Derek Jarman, Derrick Austin interweaves pop culture and history, queer culture and religious identity, as his sensual poems explore what it means to be queer, black, and fully human in 21st-century America.
Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
In Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's breathtaking debut, the speaker's queer desire and undocumented status are unspeakable, inseparable truths that yearn to break free. The poems in Cenzontle use images, interviews, elegies, and rituals to "tell it slant"—to give voice to the inexpressible and allow the caged bird to take flight.
Mules of Love by Ellen Bass
Marriage and the end of marriage; the body at fifty-one; the aging of children and the passing away of parents: Ellen Bass’s Lambda Literary Award-winning Mules of Love dwells on the types of love that "life / batters" yet remain with us, "“stubborn and indefatigable. And limitless.” A must-read collection of poems that cut straight to the heart.
My House Gathers Desires by Adam McOmber
Adam McOmber’s second collection of short stories take a Gothic sensibility to gender and sexuality. Rifling through religious lore, folktales, and the language of dreams, McOmber re-imagines the worlds of Sodom and Gomorrah, the court of Louis XIII, the alchemist's workshop, and the lair of the unicorn. Haunting and covertly humorous, My House Gathers Desires pulls back the veil and delights in the horrible beauty hidden from the light.
All seven collections are on sale now with BOA's Summer Sale! Save 30% off all BOA Bookstore orders for a limited time with promo code READBOA18.
