"Poetic exploration in Middle English about the body, physical space, ownership of space, gender, and transitioning genders."-- "i care so much abot the whord i cant reed." In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English-Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary...

Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Bury it begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. What's at stake is survival itself and the archiving of a lived and lyric history. Laughlin Award judge Tyehimba Jess says...

"In her debut collection, Tran, Spencer Williams writes equally riotous and vulnerable poems, penning a love letter to trans people and their audacity to exist in a world that constantly endangers them structurally and individually."--

"Stephanie Burt's poems in We Are Mermaids are never just one thing. Instead, they revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at first seem. In these poems, punctuation marks make arguments for their utility and their rights to exist. Frozen isn't simply another Disney animated musical but "the Most Trans Movie Ever." Mermaids, werewolves, and superheroes don't just fret over divided natures...

"A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon's debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and...

"A Map of My Want follows a nonbinary femme on their long walk home from a rural county jail as they contemplate how threesomes, quantum mechanics, beaches, and nature hikes led them to an epic journey of sexual liberation"--

Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing. Birthright begs readers to stay, to stay lucid, to stay alive, to stay present in this very moment; as it knows now is all we are guaranteed. As trauma seeps through generations, can the body deconstruct its own inheritance? In a world that only takes, what is owed? What is your Birthright, and where is home?

"Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie's stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies "by the...