One day he eavesdropped on his parents – his father was worried because according to him their firstborn son acted like a girl. In their joint Introduction Andrew McMillan discusses the strategy used in curating this collection: “The last time an anthology like this one came out from a trade publisher was almost four decades ago. It also a wonderful pair of introductions from the editors—this would be the sort of thing I normally skip over but, in this case, they serve as a kind of mission statement for the collection (and the line right at the beginning from Andrew McMillan about the poems of Thom Gunn make him feel, for the first time, that “who I was might be worth of poetry, worth of literature” hit me hard and immediately in the feels). In a way that is a shame because poetry comes in many styles, forms, rhymes, metrical patterns (or the lack thereof of one or all of these), and we should never dismiss something simply because it doesn't appear to conform with our own ideas.

His writings have been featured in Atlantic , Harper's Magazine , Nation , New Republic , New Yorker , and the New York Times . By mixing in modern poets with some more traditional poets the collection manages to create a conversation with our conception of the Canon and widen it, enhance it, and subtly change it. Based 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. The first thing he learned at school, as he watched the girls during break, was that there was a girl inside him. Thanks to the publisher via NetGalley for the eARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.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. personally, my favourite section was ‘queer relationships’, and my favourite poems (always a tough decision! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement.

This is an important collection but never worthy and deserves to be placed onto the shelves against other works which supposedly determine the "canon". For me this is a real missed opportunity to actually showcase some exceptional LGBTQ+ poets and truly say something. 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. The problem with this anthology starts with the term "queer" and how it misrepresents "queer" poetry because of its "parameters" -- namely, included poets must have had a publication published in the UK. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This book is divided into different parts and while I can't say that I liked any part the least, I definitely can say that I like the poems about Queer Future the most. Some of the neighbours forbade their kids from playing with him and his brothers because his family was Batak and Christian. It’s a “landmark” anthology, said one of the contributing poets, Kit Fan, because there hasn’t been a collection of this kind “for probably two or three decades”. I suspect the previous text it’s referencing is The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, a collection with a very, very different approach, that feels as rooted in its time as Sappho does in hers. 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.