Pride Month poetry, Part 1

As I noted in a previous post: In honor of Pride Month, the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter has devoted its June lineup to LGBTQ+ poetry. I've split those offerings up into three posts because there are so many of them. Enjoy!

Bildungsroman by Sam Sax (Note: He's the guest editor who selected this month's poetry; I've added this first set of poems from his oeuvre to the ones he actually chose for the newsletter :-).

Post-Diagnosis by Sam Sax

Pedagogy by Sam Sax

Objectophile by Sam Sax

Statement of Purpose by Kyle Carrero Lopez

At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees by Muriel Leung

Alexa for Seniors in Easy Steps by Alexis N. Garcia

Fidelity by William Ward Butler

Do You Know What Today Is? by Danez Smith

Bildungssonnet by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Summer City by travis l. tate

Pride Month poetry, Part 2

Here is the second set of LGBTQ+ poems disseminated this month via the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. Enjoy!

Position Paper #53: National Archivist by Andrea Lawlor

Lube, Ars Poetica by Lan Lesmeister

Afterwards by Eva Candelaria Sosa

Gertrude Stein by Mina Loy

In Memoriam [±That after all this I have still chosen life.] by Jimin Seo

An Erasure of Senate Bill 111 by Moncho Alvarado

My earth which is mine will always make more of itself by Kamelya Omayma Youssef

I Was Born Again the First Time I Lost Time Watching a Woman by Shira Erlichman

The Shoes My Mother Hated, in Fairness, Were Ugly by Ariana Brown

Six Love Songs by Edward Powys Mathers

[last summer I folded my dresses into storage] by Isa Borgeson

Pride Month poetry, Part 3

And here is the third and final set of LGBTQ+ poems disseminated this month via the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. Enjoy!

Deluxe Mourning Package by Rachel McKibbens

A Song [I was want] by Jos Charles

for goldfish that remember seaworld by D’mani Thomas

1915 by Robert Graves

I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer by Angel Nafis

[i love them still] by Fatimah Asghar

Nocturne by Oliver Baez Bendorf

New Moon Newton by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Dysphoria by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf

It's a small world after all...

David Mendler attended the Queer Writer's Salon in Arlington this past Thursday and reports that Dominique Dickey, one of the contributors to Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, was there. Dickey lives in D.C. and read a section of their story, "Forever Won't End Like This," which we'll be discussing on Wednesday.

As David comments, "It was cool to be able to see a local author read their work a week before we are about to discuss it!"

Scientific American's alien book picks

In anticipation of this coming Wednesday's discussion of the first set of stories in Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I found this article from Scientic American quite timely.

In it, the magazine's staff recommend 24 books that "have kept us curious about alien life and encounters with it that could change us as humans." Although I've always loved the science fiction/fantasy genre, I've only read a few of these (though I have read other works by some of these authors).

Only a handful of them have an LGBTQ connection, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which we discussed in 2024, but one in particular intrigues me: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which the staffer who nominated it describes as follows: "This is the multispecies future I want to live in. A lovable crew of diverse aliens and humans work together to understand each other and the universe."

I plan to order it, and if it lives up to that description, I'll nominate it for our next reading list.

The even lonelier city

Exactly six years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, we read Olivia Laing's essay collection The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. If you weren't with us then, or want to refresh your memory about Laing's work, here is a link to the various posts on that subject on this blog.

I bring this up because Laing has just published a powerful op-ed in The Guardian that builds on the thesis of The Lonely City to argue that "Far-right groups prey on loneliness, using the feelings of being left behind, isolated, disregarded and ignored as a recruitment tool, and offering potent narratives that stoke grievances and displace vulnerability on to other bodies that can be hated and attacked." It's well worth your time.

A homegrown D.C. queer story

During our group's illustrious 27-year history (and counting), we've read just a handful of books set in Washington, D.C., or the region. (And most of those are political or policy volumes.) Happily, a new novel sounds like a contender for our next reading list, as a way to start rectifying that sin of omission.

Benny B. Peterson’s debut novel, The Maidenheads, tells the story of an experimental punk duo in the early 2010s. D.C. native Jamie, a singer who (in a somewhat fictionalized version of Jackson-Reed High School) meets an enchanting musical collaborator and first queer love in the bullheaded Mari. Together they create the Maidenheads, an experimental punk duo on the cusp of success when their precarious romance falls apart.

In a Washington Post article Peterson explains: “It’s important for people to know that there’s a real city here, with real people and real culture and real history and a really vibrant music scene and a really vibrant queer scene,” they said. “I wanted to show a world that a lot of people don’t realize exists.”