100 Queer Poems: an anthology

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Very off-topic for this conversation, but one anthology that did have an enormous impact was one that Penguin did called Children of Albion, which was really a collection of underground British Beat Poetry but a lot of the things I repurposed for my own work, stylistically, come from reading those poems in there, and the beauty and fierceness of a poet like Adrian Mitchell has always stayed with me.

This is. a queer poetry collection about bodies and minds and connections and traumas. There’s an experimentation and playfulness with language here that gives experiences a different kind of volume.They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.” Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, winner of the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry. Their second collection Bright Fear is forthcoming from Faber. There will be at least one poem in this collection of queer poetry that will make you cry. It might be one that speaks specifically to the queer experience, or something more abstract that hits you just right with its language and tone. 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”. Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. 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. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

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.To marry his mother, his father had sold a motorbike he’d been leasing from his employer. He hopes to use the royalties from his books to marry you. 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. He was awful at making friends and spent most of his time reading or playing Nintendo and Sega. The first book he read was a book of Japanese folktales. McMillan is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Self-forgiveness when it comes to pain and trauma is something that takes courage, and Purcell invites you to try.Giles said it’s always “grand to be in something that’s doing this sort of survey of work … that’s trying to, I suppose, use anthologising to communicate something broader” about who is writing poetry, and why. 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. 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. As for how I saw myself when I was writing Flèche, I don’t think I had the words ‘queer poet’ in mind, even though I knew that my work might be framed as such upon publication. Similar to your thoughts about physical, I think Flèche is a book about mother-daughter relationships, multilingualism, fencing and existing as a postcolonial subject, as much as it is about queerness. That being said, I am incredibly proud to be seen as a queer poet, because I used to spend so much energy trying to disavow this part of my identity and my life, and that internalised homophobia fuelled my depression and anxiety. I came out ten years ago. Now, the fact that readers (queer or otherwise) can find something of value in my work just feels like an immense privilege and a true joy.