Poetry

The reader is invited to take a stroll through a life: from the comforts and questions of childhood; through the audacity, heartbreak and yearnings of young adulthood and middle age; to the awakening of acceptance and, perhaps, some insight in later life.

Written at various times over the course of 40-plus years, the poems in this collection present moments remembered, and realizations arising, over the course of the poet's life so far.

Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization.
--Largehearted Boy

All Heathens is a declaration of ownership--of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan's voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker's Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve ("I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons"), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said "when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino," Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it.

Through unnerving gallows humor and radical honesty, these poems redefine the American experience by asking the reader to consider what it means to live in the shadow of a perceived sense of freedom and to have faith when believing feels hopeless. Khalastchi's perspective as an Iraqi Jewish American brings sharp focus to the holistic uncertainties of religion, politics, assimilation, illness, love, and loss--with absurd, visceral, and wry acclaim. I type into
the internet your high schooland find rubble. Your daughter
has the flu. We are sickwith disappointment but
everyone is fine.
--Excerpt from "First Generation: Our Escape"

In Arrows of Light, Andrea Potos lets us dwell in those fragile moments between day and night, love and loss, living and death. In the stillness of of a blue scarf lake, the pale ochre walls of Van Gogh's rooms, the light that pours through her Yaya's kitchen windows, Potos takes us to the cusp of the unknowable. Pulled through by the thread of her mother's illness and eventual death, this small, elegant collection shines its gold light on those stunning, ephemeral details -- her mother's coral lipstick, blueberries like small sapphires, laundry flapping on the line like angel wings -- that seem to give us tidings of the world beyond and its fluid relationship with what we know now and will always remember.

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.

"Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family's Journey of Gender Transition," a collection of poems by Annette Langlois Grunseth, shares the parental experience of an adult child transitioning from son to daughter. Through understandable poetry, information is woven around one family's story to provide awareness about the journey of gender identity. Narrative poems explain changing avatars, using bathrooms, selecting clothing, grieving, passing as a woman, job discrimination, unique health issues, what happens to marriage and family, along with the joy that comes from seeing a child transition into living an authentic life.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours."

A book of bravado and introspection, of feminist swagger and harrowing loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Ada Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous, accessible, and "effortlessly lyrical" (New York Times)--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.