For me, it's almost part of the nature of anthologies that they receive around 3 stars, considering my average opinion of all contributions usually ends up being around the middle of the rating scale. one thing in particular i loved was the inclusion of translated works, which are so often overlooked in poetry collections, but hold such beauty. They've sequenced each poem to flow seamlessly to the next and there were surprises that made me re-read, read aloud, and read to friends on the phone.

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. For me this is a real missed opportunity to actually showcase some exceptional LGBTQ+ poets and truly say something.

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. personally, my favourite section was ‘queer relationships’, and my favourite poems (always a tough decision! Normally I would prefer an anthology that gives a small selection, 3 or 4 at least, from each poet but given the underlying theme of this particular volume I was prepared to consider 1 poem from each of 100 poets and see where it would lead me.

In this context, then, the release of 100 Queer Poems feels long overdue: it is modern, expansive, disruptive and diverse in ways that The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse simply … uh isn’t (although it might well have been at the time). i think i built and furnished mine with space for you to move through it, with me, alone in rooms [.

not all of the poems are explicitly queer, but you can rest easy knowing that they are, and they were chosen for that reason. this is undoubtedly one of the best poetry anthologies I have ever read and I am so excited to delve further into the works of some poets within this collection that left me in awe. Mary Jean Chan then takes over and shares the parameters they used as well as how the anthology is structured in terms of various themes as well as suggestions for reading the poems. this is a beautiful exploration of what it means to be a “queer poet” and offers so many different perspectives though time and location. I also really liked the separation of the poems into thematic sections - ‘Queer Domesticities’ was my personal favourite of these.

Honestly I could see this becoming a book series because there are just so many great queer poets out there that can be added to these. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. Why not something as wonderfully shocking as "Distraction" or one of the taut twelve liners in We Have the Melon that Gunn recognised as exemplars of thrilling, sexual queer poetry? Perhaps, being more than double the age of the editors, I see things and imagine things in a different light, and have experienced a queer life (to use their term) rather different to the queer life of today.I have therefore given a 5 star rating for the content of this book as an anthology of mostly contemporary poetry. And there are some major omissions from the canon of English queer poetry -- no James Kirkup, Adam Johnson, Dirg Aaab-Richards, Neil Powell, or Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Vita Sackville-West: significant poets with poems published in the UK by the Gay Men's Press, J. This book is a celebration of exuberant queer poetics, and it’s already very special because of that. 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. As the disclaimers say, the authors hope for this book to be a starting point in the journey of queer literature and authors.