100 Queer Poems: an anthology

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Abundantly rich and rewarding...capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations' Attitude He is a senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest collection is pandemonium, published by Jonathan Cape in 2021. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in French, German, Galician, Norwegian and Slovak translations. These poems are harrowing and harsh, funny and furious and unsettling and beautiful. They feel so much and make you, in turn, feel exposed and raw and understood and hopeful. Much of the poetry in Sergius Seeks Bacchus is freeform, unrestrained by rhyme and metre as, perhaps, the lives of the queer people of Indonesia should be allowed to be. This collection is kind of like being at a party: you’re glad it’s happening and you’re glad to have been invited, you feel warmly towards the hosts, and you can kind of figure out broadly why this group of people has been brought today. It’s lovely to run into some dear old friends. There may, however, also be the occasional frenemy. And while most of the new acquaintances you make are exciting and leave you curious to spend more time with them, you’ll also just fail to connect with others.

McMillan and Chan are both acclaimed poets themselves – McMillan has won the Guardian first book award, the Somerset Maugham award and the Polari prize for his work, while Chan’s debut collection Flèche won the 2019 Costa poetry award. For this York event, readers will include Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Kit Fan, Rosie Garland, Nathan Walker, JT Welsch, and the book's co-editor Andrew McMillan.Readings will be accompanied by a discussion of the book and contemporary queer poetry. I don’t feel like I am a role model, or I certainly never wanted to be one, but I guess there are periods of professional success which make you more visible than at other times, and to that end I try to be as generous as I can, with formal and informal mentoring, with blurbs and trying to help share other poets’ work. I’m trying to imitate the generosity I had from so many at the start of my career, and what is the worth of that, if it isn’t something you can pass forward? I think in the past I’ve felt more compelled to speak out on things even though I wasn’t necessarily, beyond a purely personal sense, qualified to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps it’s just getting older, in literary and literal terms, that makes me feel less compelled to do that – I’d rather learn, read, donate, highlight other people who can use their voices in a much more constructive way than I can. These are relatable experiences but the way that Jason digests and expels them gives them a new light, and a possible new way for you to understand them. This was followed by one of the most intimate and emotionally sensitive debut novels one could ever read: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

also - please do not skip the introductions! there is a real sense of comfort provided from them, especially as you move through the collection. not all of the poems are explicitly queer, but you can rest easy knowing that they are, and they were chosen for that reason. The anthology is split into various sections, covering everything from domesticity and history to the city and nature.

I hope that’s what our anthology will do, too. As we’ve said in our respective editorials, an anthology is never finished, and ours is by no means comprehensive or complete. Our hope is that by publishing 100 Queer Poems, our readers will be encouraged to discover hundreds more in the years to come. Harry Josephine Giles’ poem May a transsexual hear a bird? touches on how their life is politicised. “I’m somebody that leads a very political life and has been very involved in activist movements for a long time,” they said. “And for me, poetry is a space where I can kind of talk out the experience of that.” The poem asks a number of questions, says Bernard: “What has passed away and what will transpire? Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?”

Queerness and religion, the way in which these two interact, wage war, and cause heartache when mixed — this is all felt with both deep sorrow and a flighty wit in this, one of the most important queer poetry collections ever written. When he was little he fell from a tree. Ever since, his first memory of his father was himself in school uniform, squatting on the toilet. This stemmed from his first day of school – he was five and right before they set off he told his father he needed to poop.

The power of the anthology, said Bernard, is that it “showcases each poem and poet doing something interesting with the subject in their historical context”. 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. In 2021, Flèche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, they currently live in Oxford. Meanwhile, Fan was surprised when Chan and McMillan chose his poem Hokkaido for the book, but says when he thought about it, it made sense.

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The poems in this collection are transportive. They take you somewhere else entirely. They truly demonstrate the beauty of poetry, in every sense of that word. 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. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. McMillan’s measured reading adds to the cadence and insights we can draw from his work; the wants, the uncertainties, the spaces in-between, many, complex, brave and truthful. Non-binary American poet Andrea Gibson has gathered together here a collection of lyrical, sometimes surreal, sometimes narrative poems about love, identity, growth, and so much more. Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. It deserves a place on the shelf of every reader keen to discover and rediscover how queer poets speak to one another across the generations.

They encourage us to think differently about queer identity, abuse, depression, oppression, hope, and relief. They offer us empathy and ask for it in return. Canadian poet Jason Purcell is the co-owner of Glass Bookshop, a person who lives and breathes language and literature. And here they put their own command over language to impeccable use. There is a wider breadth to the wanderings of these poems, too, as they concern themselves with the broad strokes of love as it exists today. Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard. 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”. This book is a celebration of exuberant queer poetics, and it’s very special because of that Norman Erikson PasaribuBased on my personal experience here, the literary communities are often allergic to anything autobiographical,” said Pasaribu, whose short story collection Happy Stories, Mostly, translated by Tiffany Tsao, was longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize. “When I was starting publishing my writing, people would focus on the things they considered autobiographical and talk about them as if they were the weakness of my writing. So I thought it would be fun to be naughty about it by employing a tauntingly autobiographical title, a curriculum vitae.” One Sunday morning, his father took him and his brothers to jog and play soccer on a badminton court nearby. You banci! his father screamed in front of everyone. Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past.Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, it includesclassics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard. He ran away. In a bookstore in Jakarta he discovered a book by Herta Müller. Herta wrote about Ceausçescu’s Securitate. It reminded him of his mother. He read every English translation of her work and loved them all. Less well-known is a poet such as F.T. Prince, author of the classic “Soldiers Bathing” (1942). John Wieners, Lee Harwood, and John Ashbery admired Prince, a writer of formal intricacy and leisurely agitation. Of Prince’s “Words from Edmund Burke,” Harwood observed, “[Prince] wrote [a whole] poem about being buggered, and he has this great line in it — ‘I am it would seem an acceptable tube.’ Well, it is just so genteel! I admired it very much.”