Meanwhile Bernard’s poem Hiss came about because they were “thinking about all of the burned buildings [they] have seen or entered, how it feels to stand upright below an uncertain roof, how such buildings appear as both inside and outside, as both ruin and vitrine”. I admit that I rarely read poetry though always feel that I should try to incorporate more in my reading.

Looking around at all the various poetries and range of voices we see being published now, and the twentieth-century voices they’re in conversation with, I began to wonder what a new anthology might look like;” He then goes on to clarify how the word ‘queer’ is used within the anthology. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I was looking forward to working my way through this anthology, edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan. were ‘what gretel knows’, ‘valentine’, ‘the whistler’, ‘untitled/villanelle’, ��funeral blues’, ‘wrong star’, ‘afterwards’, ‘rooms’, ‘a litany for survival’, ’2004’, and ‘reasons for staying’, but all of them certainly hold their own power. the only slight criticism i have is i would love the inclusion of the pronouns of the poets, as i would hate to misgender them.Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable? As with all poetry collections, especially if there's a variety of different poets, there will be poems and poets you connect with and ones you won't. She currently lives in London, and is Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. That, though, is my personal opinion, one derived from decades of writing, campaigning, demonstrating, reading, studying.

There are many, many fine pieces here, and as I was reading I was making notes of new poets whose work I will be seeking out.His work is sensual, erotic, witty, provocative, political, reflective, performative, and written with a wide understanding of same sex passion from the classical world onwards. The collection is cleverly themed so that we can see thoughts on gay life from a youthful point of view into older age, from the domestic to the international.

Nevertheless, I'm very glad to have read this collection because it introduced me to a number of poets to check out in the future, and in general, I just appreciated seeing the numerous ways in which the authors of these 100 poems incorporated queerness into their poetry. Your descendants will fill the Earth so that whenever anyone is walking alone in the dark they will hear from every window in every building on both sides of the street, voices reaching out, ‘Salam!Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche , which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. As with any anthology some resonated more than others, but overall it was very thought provoking and well curated. Plus it felt weird to read 100 poems one after the other for a review, when—all things being equal—I would have more naturally engaged in a book like this by dipping and out, reading by mood and moment (I am not, for example, the sort of person who moves linearly through a museum).

The English poets that represnt queer history are nothing more than a scattering of odd seeds from English poetry: Douglas, Owen, Brooke and Auden's over anthologised "Funeral Blues," made popular via Four Weddings and a Funeral. I particularly enjoyed the experience of reading a much older poem sandwiched between two more recent poems, and having the context and experience reading of the older one entirely transformed. One day he eavesdropped on his parents – his father was worried because according to him their firstborn son acted like a girl. Together you both will grow old, and be wed before the Three-Branched God – the tree-like god – and have a child named Langit.

They've structured the anthology into thoughtful sections that tide one through a loose chronological experience: of childhood, domesticities, relationships, landscapes, histories and futures. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide , was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. All in all this is a "very safe" anthology in which, as Keith Vaughan once wrote, "the lights are on" yet there is little "illumination.