Essential Queer Poetry Collections

The scope of queer poetry and what it can offer us (just as is the case with feminist poetry) is broad and endless.

Here, you’ll find a spectrum of queer love, sex, and experiences that speak to our broader loves and lives (and even some queer children’s poetry, too!)

Limbic by Peter Scalpello

Gay, non-binary, and Glaswegian poet Peter Scalpello has put together a collection of raw, punk, open-hearted queer poems.

These are intimate, personal poems that come straight from the heart. They speak of specific experiences that are both theirs and ours; things we can all understand and related to.

These poems seethe with anger, regret, fear, confusion, but also love and compassion and hope.

Scalpello is a writer full of empathy and consideration. They offer that to us here with Limbic. But these poems are also raw and crude and harsh. They balance pain and pleasure perfectly.

Published by the wonderful Cypher Press, Limbic is like a fresh wound being treated. A beautiful collection of varied and tough and powerful poetry, and one of the finest queer poetry collections around.

Buy a copy here!

You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson

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.

In You Better Be Lightning, you’ll find longer narrative poems that tell specific tales of experiences both personal and universal.

You’ll also find dense metaphors that border on the strange and the surreal, but which will nonetheless strike a nerve deep inside; a primal connection of love and understanding between you and them.

It’s the shorter poems, ones made up of just a handful of short lines, that hit hardest though. These poems can be quickly memorised and carried around like a mantra.

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.

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.

These poems speak loudly and without a filter; they speak from a heart that has been damaged and stitched back together, stronger and stranger than before.

Buy a copy here!

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell

Queer Black author and musician Brontez Purnell shook up the LGBTQ+ fiction space with his short story collection 100 Boyfriends, and with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt he continues to innovate and create astonishing works of literature. Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt is a memoir of sorts; a collection of short pieces of prose poetry that behave as ruminations and confessions about his life, his family, his childhood, and those he has loved.

This is a collection that blurs the lines between prose, memoir, and poetry. It is brutally raw and honest, while also being carefully selective when it comes to its language, tone, and expression. Beautifully and intricately carved, this is a memoir that will leave a mark on the reader; a work of brilliance that cuts open its writer and invites the reader to see inside. This kind of honesty takes courage, but there is a sense of liberation that comes with it.

Buy a copy of Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt here!

The Air Year by Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird is one of those poets whose works you feel compelled to thrust into the hands of every passerby on the street. Her works are brutally honest, and they ride the spectrum of emotion in such an unrestrained and unapologetic way—from tongue-in-cheek and often uncomfortable hilarity to the kind of heartbreak and grief we all fear experiencing.

This is an unflinching collection of queer poetry that forces the reader to confront feelings of anxiety and depression, as well as love and loss. There is satire here, too, and an exploration of the micro moments of life. One poem, The Red Telephone, relates the experience of a woman ignoring the warning signs of her partner’s depression until it’s too late. It is a harrowing examination of loss and regret.

Many of these are not easy poems to wrangle with, but all are written with an astonishing level of clarity, imagination, mastery of language, and sometimes surrealism and subtlety. There is nobody quite like Bird.

Buy a copy of The Air Year here!

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles

Magic meets science fiction in this unique verse novel by Harry Josephine Giles. While not a poetry collection, Deep Wheel Orcadia remains poetry in the classical sense.

This is easily one of the most impactful and important pieces of queer poetry in years, by a powerful voice amongst transgender authors.

The story follows Astrid, who recently returned home from art school on Mars, and Darling, who is fleeing another life and searching for a place to hide.

The unlikely pair meet on the Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station fighting for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the struggling community behind entirely. 

A gorgeous feat of poetic verse, Deep Wheel Orcadia weaves a story of place and belonging while introducing a compelling cast of characters that you’re sure to resonate with.

Orcadian Harry Josephine Giles strikes into an exciting new realm with this exciting new piece of queer poetry.

Buy a copy here!

What Girls Do in the Dark by Rosie Garland

If you are a fan of mythology and the gothic then this enchanting collection is for you.

Garland blends fable, fantasy, and sci-fi to create a memorable collection that is both grounded in the body and the lived experience of queer people, while also hurling us deep into outer space and the cosmos.

Wonderfully readable, this is a collection that you will keep coming back to.

Buy a copy here!

Soft Science by Franny Choi

With Soft Science, Franny Choi has written a collection of carefully-curated themed poems which combines science-fiction with the presentation of queer people, people of colour, and immigrants within modern Western society.

Each poem examines the relationship between people of different colours, genders, and sexualities within the human race, and uses the Blade Runner philosophy of examining what it means to be conscious, to have a soul, to have free thought and conscience – to be human.

It asks us – especially white people – to be honest about whether or not we see every human as equal, even today. Is our moral code as fair as we think it is?

Soft Science asks us to consider the sum of our parts: where do we come from, what makes us, how do we classify ourselves, and why is that important or unimportant?

There are few queer poetry collections as unique, adventurous, and daring as Soft Science.

Buy a copy here!

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is arguably one of the most famous, beloved, and impactful poetry writing today, especially within the queer community.

His initial poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, made such a huge splash that it felt as though the world suddenly held its breath.

This was followed by one of the most intimate and emotionally sensitive debut novels one could ever read: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vuong’s second poetry collection, Time Is A Mother, was written after the death of his mother. It’s a collection about love, family, queerness, modern American life, and many other topics.

Some poems are grounded in his life and experiences; others are incredibly, beautifully abstract. They communicate through tone and emotion and language, even if the theme or concept isn’t clear.

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.

This is one of the greatest queer poetry collections of all time.

Buy a copy here!

Swollening by Jason Purcell

Swollening is a slender, 100-page collection of queer poetry that invites you to chew on it slowly, over time. To return to it when you feel differently and let it wash over you again and again.

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.

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.

Trauma is a real focus here: how it is experienced, how it gets stuck, how it is moved through and past and over.

Self-forgiveness when it comes to pain and trauma is something that takes courage, and Purcell invites you to try.

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.

Buy a copy here!

Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

In this intimate collection of queer poetry, Norman Erikson Pasaribu has taken the names of Sergius and Bacchus – and what they represent – for his collection’s title, phrasing it as Sergius Seeks Bacchus perhaps as a reflection of the repeated theme found in the book’s pages: that of uprooted unrest, searching, longing. Seeking.

Despite his tumultuous relationship with religion, the impact it has had on Norman and his writing is painted widely across his poetry. He decries its ability – its willingness – to abandon queer people, to make pariahs of them.

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.

The awkward and rigid binaries of heterosexual relationships are examined through a piteous lens, and the secrets of frightened, closeted gay married men are exposed.

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.

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.

Buy a copy here!

The Human Body is a Hive by Erica Gillingham

This gorgeously titled collection, separated into two halves, is an exploration of queer lives, loves, and families.

It is a collection that begins with a celebration of queer sex, lust, and desire, before moving into how we build our families and friendships. How things fall apart, and how we mend ourselves.

When things break, what do those pieces look like? And what can be done with them?

In a collection that passes across the scope of lives and relationships, The Human Body is a Hive also moves through the spectrum of human emotion.

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.

There is a focus here on growing a family as queer people: pregnancy and birth and raising children.

It looks at the intricacies and difficulties and modern miracles of queer family life. It is a very unique queer poetry collection that should be cherished.

Buy a copy here!

Wain: LGBT Reimaginings of Scottish Folklore by Rachel Plummer

This queer poetry collection does exactly what it says on the tin. With a target audience of younger readers (though it can be enjoyed by anyone), Wain retells myths from Scottish folklore with a queer twist.

Reimaginings of folk tales and mythology are a popular genre these days, but even in that crowded space Wain is doing something unique, by virtue of being queer, poetry, and for children.

Familiar creatures are visited here, including Nessie herself. You’ll meet kelpies and selkies and learn more about yourself in the process.

These are poems written with wit, kindness, and imagination that encourage queer kids and young people to understand themselves better, feel less alone, and feel like magic.

This is a very clever approach to queer poetry, to folklore, and to community. It does so much so well.

Buy a copy here!

Smitten: This is What Love Looks Like, Poetry by Women for Women

Smitten is a dense collection of queer poetry that speaks to the lesbian experience in the broadest possible way.

120 lesbians of all ages, from all corners of the globe, have written here about love and loss and sex and hatred and anger, and loneliness, and every other feeling you can imagine having.

While these are poems about lesbian love and lives, they are still universal and can be understood and appreciated by anyone, queer or otherwise.

Because love is love, and pain is pain, and you will see and know all of it.

That said, this is also still and specifically a celebration of lesbian love: the love between women. The love and lust and appreciation that women feel for one another.

Sexy, sensual, and so much more.

Buy a copy here!

100 Queer Poems

Any poetry fan is going to recognise some of the bigger names featured in this collection — Kae Tempest, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy.

But there will also be plenty that are new for you to discover, empathise with, and fall in love with.

Contemporary and classic poems are collected here as a kind of time capsule, showing the state of the queer poetry landscape and how it has morphed over time.

There aren’t many collections that include both Wilfred Owen and Harry Josephine Giles but that’s the scope and beauty of this collection.

No other queer poetry collection offers so much breadth, such a journey through time and space and across the full LGBTQ+ spectrum of experiences. Incredible.

Buy a copy here!

It is a place called home by every kind of human being. And so, Indonesian novels, stories, and poems offer readers that same kind of diversity and excitement.

The Indonesian novels, stories, and poems found here do not encompass the entire literary scope of Indonesia, but they do offer a few wonderful places to begin reading Indonesian books in translation.

Here, you’ll find some of Indonesia’s best writers, poets, and translators.

Indonesian Short Stories

Here are two collections of Indonesian short stories, one of which paints a beautiful picture of Jakarta by the hands of ten of Indonesia’s best writers; the other puts a feminist horror twist on classic Indonesian folk tales.

The Book of Jakarta: A City in Short Fiction

Edited by Maesy Ang & Teddy W. Kusuma

Jakarta is likely the most multicultural city in all of Asia, and a quick read of the introduction to The Book of Jakarta serves as a good lesson in why this is. Following that up with a read through the ten stories that make up The Book of Jakarta allows you to see all sides of life in Indonesia’s capital city.

The diversity of Jakarta can be seen in its religions, cuisine, languages and dialects, ethnicities, politics, and more. Reading a collection of stories by writers of different ages, genders, and ethnic backgrounds — all of whom are writing about Jakarta — is like taking a cultural, geographic, and historic tour of the city.

A read of the book’s introduction (written by its editors, Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma) is enough to be provided with a detailed and enlightening history lesson about Jakarta; one which even speculates about the city’s future.

In 1998, Indonesia underwent a revolution, when the dictatorship of President Suharto’s New Order was topped. This New Order came about after World War II and the relinquishing of control from the Japanese Empire. Prior to Japan’s control, Indonesia had been occupied by almost every great European power at some point and for some time.

The cultural and political history taught to us by this introduction alone is illuminating, and the book has yet to even begin. What follows the book’s introduction is a deep dive into the city of Jakarta from the perspective of a diverse group of writers and translators.

If you want my advice, the final story in The Book of Jakarta — titled A Day in the Life of a Guy from Depok who Travels to Jakarta, written by Yusi Avianto Pareanom and translated by Daniel Owen — is actually the best place to start.

This final story gives readers a funny, fascinating, and frustrating tour of the city. It follows an ordinary day in the life of a suburban man who works as a landscape gardener. He takes the train into the city to sort out a visa at the US embassy, only to find that he has forgotten his passport.

While in the city, our man takes a bus, a few taxis, and another train as he runs errands, meets friends, chats with strangers, and navigates the complex, unpredictable routes of Jakarta. This story introduces us to Chinese-Indonesians, Arab Indonesian Muslims, friendly coffeehouse owners, misogynistic cab drivers, punk kids, and more.

A Day in the Life of a Guy from Depok who Travels to Jakarta is a true tour of the city, both geographical and emotional, as we experience all the frustrations and difficulties of physically navigating city life. We laugh, grit our teeth, and laugh again right alongside our protagonist as we live a normal life in Jakarta.

The religious and cultural diversity of Jakarta can most clearly be seen in two of its most claustrophobic stories: The Aroma of Shrimp Paste by Hanna Fransisca (translated by Khairani Barokka) and Haji Syiah by Ben Sohib (translated by Paul Agusta).

The Aroma of Shrimp Paste is a sharply-written Kafkaesque tale of nonsense bureaucracy set in an immigration office. Our protagonist is a Chinese-Indonesian woman who is patronised, lied to, and led in circles by the people around her for several hours. It’s a story that is, in true Kafkaesque fashion, equal parks darkly funny and deeply frustrating.

The Arab-Indonesian world, on the other hand, is shown to us by Ben Sohib in Haji Syiah, a story which tells the story of the titular Haji Syiah, a Sunni cleric who works to reform the lives of two local drunks, Faruk and Ketel. The story is told through hearsay and with humorous insights by other clerics in the neighbourhood.

In the introduction to The Book of Jakarta, editors Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma remark on the city’s doomed future, with climate change rapidly dragging the city down into the depths. Half of Jakarta will likely be underwater by 2050.

This very real, very near future is explored in The Book of Jakarta’s shortest story: Buyan by utiuts (translated by Zoe McLaughlin). Buyan tells the brief tale of a woman in a future Jakarta who is stuck inside a self-driving taxi, headed for the drowned half of the city and worried for her life.

Buyan is a hilarious story that approaches the frightening future of the city with joviality. Instead of warning us about this calamitous future, it instead shows us a very possible, very ordinary situation that could easily occur to any ordinary person once that calamity finally happens.

Like every other book in the A City in Short Fiction series by Comma Press, The Book of Jakarta is a collection of short Indonesian stories that, together, serve as a kind of literary mosaic of the city of Jakarta.

What that mosaic most brightly shows is the electric diversity of Jakarta. Many of these stories have so little in common with one another, serving to show just how ethnically, religiously, and politically varied Jakarta is. This city contains multitudes and it is beautiful.

Read More: 7 Books of Arabic Short Stories

Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha

Translated by Stephen J. Epstein

Most of us know that every country and culture has its folk tales and fairy tales, and most of us know that these often horrific tales of punishment, death, revenge, and tragedy have been muted and twisted into happy stories by Disney, and in Japan’s recent children’s anime Yokai Watch.

But how can we take the folk tales that our ancestors grew up with and translate them faithfully and imaginatively to fit the modern world, without losing the horror?

Intan Paramaditha has done not only this, but has also put a wonderfully feminist, gothic spin on every single tale, making it all the more relevant and poignant in our modern day.

She has also recently published a choose your own adventure narrative which is just as unique, challenging, as unsettling as Apple and Knife.

Apple and Knife is a collection of fairy tales, predominantly set in and around her home of Indonesia, which take inspiration from local Indonesian folk tales with a few other (and some recognisable) fairy tales from the other corners of the world thrown in.

Before we discuss the details of what makes this book such a triumph, uproarious applause, I insist, must be lauded on Stephen J Epstein for his astonishing translation skills here.

Prophecies and poetry here are translated with such confidence and skill that it is easy to forget that these stories were translated at all. Epstein is a credit to his craft, and budding translators should pay attention: this is how you translate.

Reminiscent of UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry collection, The World’s Wife and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Paramaditha has collected stories from her native land, and the world over, switched their focus to that of a modern woman, and added a theme or moral that resonates well with us today.

The result of this staggering effort is astonishing. Every tale in this book is dark (at times darkly comic, at others darkly tragic) and leaves the reader, lacking any catharsis, with a need to put down the book and collect their thoughts for a moment.

These stories allow us a chance to re-evaluate our own modern myths and values: how men treat the women in their family; the ways in which we experience and talk about women’s issues (emotional, psychological, and physical); the ways in which our religions affect our outlook on sex, marriage, and gender.

Taboos and faux pas come under fire, and history is held under a microscope, all while under the guise of a simple fairy tale. The power and intelligence of these tales cannot be understated.

These female-focussed stories force to the surface questions that both men and women have either always wanted to ask, or never thought to ask before. But every one of these heavy themes — such as abortion and menstruation — is delivered as a ghostly, bloody, horror story.

Apple and Knife is a book that does more than push boundaries; it breaks them down completely. Patriarchal traditions, Muslim values, and cultural superstitions are all questioned and held accountable here.

Every story is at once a garish and nasty folktale to be enjoyed and gasped at, but also serves as a reminder to women that they are strong and fierce and dangerous. And that we men should take stock of our privileges, and the boxes we force women into, whether we are aware of it or not.

Indonesian Novels

These are three of the finest Indonesian novels by three outstanding Indonesian writers, translated by some of the best in the business.

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

Translated by the author

Birth Canal is an Indonesian novel presented as four interconnected tales, each of which centring around the difficult, dynamic lives and experiences of Indonesian women from World War II to the present day.

The first story is told from the perspective of a nameless man in Jakarta who has spent his life suffering in unrequited love with a dear friend named Nastiti, who, one day, suddenly vanishes.

The second story follows Nastiti’s mother, whose own mother was used as a “comfort woman” and given the Japanese name Hana by the Japanese military during World War II. She has travelled to Amsterdam to tell her mother’s story to an academic.

The third story centres around Hana’s Japanese husband, who was tormented by the war, suffered PTSD, and tormented and abused Hana in turn.

The fourth and final story returns us to the present day, and follows Dara, the girlfriend of the nameless man from the first story. Dara has since married someone else, whose work took him to Osaka, and there she is attempting to acclimatise, learn the language, make friends, and have a baby.

Birth Canal spans many lives and many years; it explores the complex and murky ways in which we affect one another, and more specifically how we often make each other suffer without ever coming to terms with that fact.

Blending war, politics, and tragedy in powerful ways, Birth Canal is an ambitious short novel covered in scars.

Buy a copy of Birth Canal here!

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha

Translated by Stephen J. Epstein

The Wandering is a dense Indonesian novel of branching paths inspired by the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books of old. But while those books were fantastical, and written for kids to experiment with their own imaginations, The Wandering is a story of migration, of searching the world for happiness and hoping that it will be found over the next page (or if you turn to page 42).

The narrative in The Wandering is written in the second person, with all the action directed at ‘you’, the reader. But you are no blank slate here; in fact, you’re a fairly defined protagonist.

‘You’ are a woman, aged 27, Indonesian, and living in Jakarta as an English teacher. When the Devil comes to you, you lash him to your bed and make him your lover for a few weeks until, eventually, you use him to gain access to the wide world.

The Devil provides you with a pair of red Dorothy shoes and magics you away to New York. Specifically, a cab on the way to JFK, with a ticket for Berlin.

You are disorientated and, when you arrive at the airport, you realise one of your red magic shoes is missing, and you must make your first choice: continue on to Berlin, return to NYC and find your apartment, or report the missing shoe to the police. Each thread leads you to more threads, and there are fifteen possible endings to your story.

The Wandering does an obscene number of things well. It’s a strange tale that blends tongue-in-cheek magic realism with very grounded and anxiety-riddled choices and pressures.

This is even reflected in the endings, some of which involve the re-emergence of the Devil or a tussle with the presence behind a magic mirror, while others peter out into a mundane but satisfying and ordinary resolution. At its core, however, it is a book about restlessness.

The choice of title for this novel, The Wandering, is pitch perfect. While it might seem at first to be a book about travel (where do I fancy flying off to now, with my new-found freedom?), it is in fact a tale of belonging. It’s a novel that asks you to question what, exactly, happiness is.

It posits that happiness is not something that cannot be chased nor found. Instead, our protagonist must wander. She wanders the United States, she wanders the streets of New York, she wanders over to Europe and back again, and at no point is true happiness or satisfaction found.

The Wandering is a deeply affecting, intensely personal novel that uses its experimental method of storytelling to worm its way into your very bones. Even though our protagonist is a well-established character whom you happen to, at least to a point, embody and control, you still desperately feel for her.

The novel wants us to know that happiness and satisfaction is not so easily found, that answers are hard to come by, and it forces us to realise that actively, rather than passively.

This is not a narrative that we ingest. Nothing is told to us. Instead, it is actively experienced through the choices we make. It builds a frantic anxiety that cannot be shaken, and by the time we eventually reach a decent enough ending – one that might lack pomp and splendour but is good enough – we have to feel content in that.

The Wandering is an interactive adventure like no other, one which leaves you feeling chilled and frightened and alone. It asks you to, please, consider how you go about searching for answers and happiness. It wants the best for you, but it admits that the best is hard to find.

Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan

Translated by Labodalih Sembiring

Although fairly slim, on paper Man Tiger almost begs to be labelled a work of magical realism; a generational tale set in an unnamed town in the tropics teeming with lusts and dreams, violence and loss, spirits and folklore.

Littered throughout are references both allegorical and literal to Indonesia’s colonial past and economic struggles. Kurniawan lived through the brutal and repressive Suharto dictatorship which saw many books banned and many writers imprisoned or disappeared.

Fertile ground indeed for the kind of socio-politcal satire of Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and, after all, the English translation is published by Verso books, an imprint better known for works of leftist economics and Marxist theory than literature and fiction.

However, the book’s appeal and charm lie in the way it flouts the conventions of magical realism whilst refusing to shrug off the genre completely.

Kurniawan did not grow up around books; in his childhood he’d listen to his grandmother tell stories and plays on the radio and then as a teenager he read action and horror comics bought from street vendors.

It wasn’t until entering university that he became exposed to more conventional literature, including Western and Latin American works. All three influences make themselves known as Man Tiger unfolds.

The oral narratives of Kurniawan’s youth are echoed in the way that many of the novel’s key events are given second hand as reports or gossip and the gruesome details of the murder at the heart of the story could be taken from the pages of a teenager’s comic book.

But after the initial shock and excitement of the bloodshed Man Tiger gives way to a longer and more reflective exploration of the past events that lead to the crime, and it’s this history that constitutes the bulk of the work.

In Man Tiger Kurniawan shows a great restraint in his handling of language and use of literary devices, limiting himself to a few expertly placed images that are seamlessly woven into the world of the novel rather than existing as mere linguistic showboating on the page. Indonesia’s bloody past is given to us at the scene of a savage murder.

The history of Japanese colonialism is encased in actual historical relics — the rusty samurai swords dotted around the town — one of which is dragged along “scarring the ground with its tip” as a reminder of the lasting damage of colonial rule and its capacity to still cause harm in the present.

Kurniawan’s metaphors and devices have a solidity to them, a palpable presence in the space of the novel. It’s this groundedness, this sense that everything in the novel possesses weight, that sets Man Tiger apart from Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In those works the writers employ rich and vivid sensory descriptions, the effect of which is to overwhelm and knock the reader back and out of their usual centre of perception enough that a veil of mysticism can be draped across the gap between the world and our perception of it, rendering the events of those stories extraordinary and fantastical.

Man Tiger takes a different approach, for whilst we are still immersed in Kurniawan’s tropics overgrowing with palm trees, cassava and papaya, the magical and the supernatural always make way for reality and are pushed aside before it.

For all the bustle and busyness of the scenery and surroundings we are always anchored down by the everyday: school girls queuing up for breakfast fritters worry about being late for class, the protagonist Margio as a child riding a wagon across a country everywhere bursting with exotic sights yet ultimately more concerned with his marbles and trading cards.

Later, an adolescent Margio trying to navigate a blossoming romance with a local girl. Even the tigress spirit alluded to in the title is described as being “like a giant domestic cat”.

Always we are slowed down to the pace of day-to-day life. Rituals involving animal sacrifice are described more in terms of the logistics of their preparation rather than their occult aims; our attention rests more on the cigarettes smoked by gravediggers rather than the occupants of said graves, even when the grave site appears to be afflicted by a curse.

The structure of the novel itself is a process of demystifying and explaining away the otherworldly, beginning with a shocking murder and talk of animal possession before a chapter-by-chapter unpacking of the history of the families involved and their small tragedies, simple lives, lusts, infidelities and desires.

In the end, the domestic violence at the centre of Margio’s home life is given far more central a role than the murder or the lingering effects of past colonial violence.

And on the subject of violence, Kurniawan makes sure not to let it become too divorced from reality, making sure that what gore is present is tied to the earth in ways that ensure we remember that, sadly, this kind of carnage can be a very real part of the world.

There are “clods of flesh scattered all over the floor, like spilled spaghetti sauce” and a severed artery “dangling like a cable in a shattered radio”. He is quick to tell us that these visceral scenes are more terrifying than ghosts and nightmares, “more brutal than any horror film”.

There is a sense that, between the frequent banality of life and the moments of tragedy and horror that can punctuate it at any time, there is something precious to be found in the flow of normality.

It’s too cheap and easy to finish by writing something to the effect that Kurniawan is putting the real into magical realism; but I will say that, with Man Tiger, he has given us a work that remembers the capacity of fiction to bring us back to the world; it captures the moment when we are shaken from a daydream as if by a sudden shout or, more appropriately, a roar.

(Written by Frank Jayne).

The Majesties by Tiffany Tsao

The Majesties certainly launches itself out of the gate with a first chapter that promises an intense thriller of a tale. Protagonist and narrator Gwendolyn has always been inseparably close to her sister Estella — they even went to the same college at the same time — but now she finds herself in a coma after Estella poisoned the shark fin soup at an enormous family gathering, murdering 300 guests.

The sole survivor being Gwendolyn who, now trapped in her own comatose mind, has nothing to do but unravel the threads which led to this point. What moments in Estella’s life led her to this decision to kill 300 people, most of which were her own family?

Every single moment of The Majesties is written and narrated with absolute control. Not a beat is skipped or misjudged, which is what makes it such a finely tuned thriller.

Except The Majesties isn’t entirely concerned with being a thriller. As I said, this novel is not a typical whodunnit murder mystery, with a plot that hinges on finding answers – even though that is arguably still the driving force of the plot.

Instead, this is more a novel about family and what being part of one ultimately does to our psyches. Consider your own family and the scars they have left on you throughout your life, whether intentional or not.

For Gwendolyn and Estella, born into a vastly wealthy empire of a Chinese-Indonesian family, their scars run deep. While I, personally, have little love for the troubles of the rich, Tiffany Tsao made me care immensely for these two sisters; trapped as they are in a world they didn’t choose.

Gwendolyn, now in her early thirties, made the choice not long ago to leave the family alone – to separate herself and set up her own business: Bagatelle. It’s an unsettling business, to be sure.

Using a serum made from cordyceps (parasites which burrow into the brains of insects) Bagatelle sells jewellery with insects encased inside, frozen by the serum.

Gwendolyn begged Estella to join her in her venture, but Estella refused, choosing to stay close to the family. The strain this disagreement places on them forms a large motivation for many events of this story.

The story itself is told across an entire lifetime split in two. We are frequently thrown from period to period as our comatose narrator rushes to fit two puzzle pieces – found in two different decades – neatly together.

We travel through both time and space to the beginnings of Bagatelle in Jakarta; further back to their years studying together in California; forward again to Estella’s rocky marriage.

Gwendolyn’s ability to tell Estella’s story with so much detail and clarity is enough to demonstrate their closeness; their need for one another. In fact, in many ways, this is Estella’s story. Gwendolyn is, after all, desperate to understand what led her to become a mass murderer, and to want to take Gwendolyn herself down with the family.

This flitting between continents and time periods could so easily fall apart or become disjointed at the hands of a less competent writer. But Tsao, not for a single moment, loses control of her narrator and her place in the story.

While we are being rushed hither and yon, and we might feel a lack of control, we can rest easy knowing that Tsao has a firm grip on the story’s reigns.

This is an expertly crafted tale which, even though it moves backwards and forwards through time, has an emotional progression that only moves in one direction as Gwendolyn, the story’s puppet, comes to understand the existence of her strings. It’s fitting, looking at it this way, that Estella refers to her sister as Doll.

Looking at The Majesties through the lens of a thriller, all of the necessary tropes and methods are in place: Chekhov’s gun is loaded; metaphors and foreshadowing are heavy-handed but never awkward; dominoes are set up and breadcrumbs laid down with delicacy and decisiveness.

But all of this is easily forgotten due to Tsao’s deft sleight of hand as she encourages us to put all of that aside – to forget that this is a thriller – and instead directs us to pay attention to and care about these sisters and the scars they’ve collected.

Gwendolyn and Estella are not easy to love. Sometimes you’ll find yourself siding with one over the other, only to switch sides later.

Sometimes your heart will ache for them and their lot in life — one of entrapment and family games — while at others you might think how much you would prefer their issues, their drama, over your own. But all of this guarantees us protagonists who are fallible and human.

Indonesian Poetry

Here is an Indonesian poetry collection by a vital figure in the world of queer poetry, full of heart and soul and love.

Sergius Seeks Bacchus By Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Translated by Tiffany Tsao

Sergius and Bacchus were fourth-century Roman soldiers. In secret, they were also Christians. They would pray in isolation but were eventually found out and executed for their faith.

Parallels between their secrecy and that of so many queer communities across the globe has turned them into something of a symbol for queer visibility.

In this intimate collection of queer poetry, Norman Erikson Pasaribu has taken the names of Sergius and Bacchus – and what they represent – for his collection’s title, phrasing it as Sergius Seeks Bacchus perhaps as a reflection of the repeated theme found in the book’s pages: that of uprooted unrest, searching, longing. Seeking.

In an interview with Electric Lit, Norman himself discussed the counterparts of his own writing and that found in Christian history, as well as his own connection with religion.

He recalls: “I attended my old office’s Easter mass, and the priest, who was a Toba-Batak man, threw homophobic slurs during his sermon.

I ended up excusing myself and cried outside the hall. After that, the desire to go to church gradually diminished.”

Despite this tumultuous relationship with religion, the impact it has had on Norman and his writing is painted widely across his poetry. He decries its ability – its willingness – to abandon queer people, to make pariahs of them.

In the three-part poem Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso he remarks of a queer man in Paradise: “See him here, with all the Lost and the lives never His.”

In Theophilus, a poem named for the ‘Friend of God’ said to have written the Gospel of Luke, he retells the story of Creation as a man seeking basic human needs: “The sun’s so strong. I’m parched.” Each time, God delivers, but when the man remarks, “It’s so deserted. I’m Lonely,” God says nothing, and a voice says, “You will never be with the someone who loves you most.”

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.

The awkward and rigid binaries of heterosexual relationships are examined through a piteous lens, and the secrets of frightened, closeted gay married men are exposed.

A cynicism is raised against the state, in a quintessential Kafkaesque manner, as Norman jokes at how governments and industries may find a way of turning emotions, feelings of love, and life experiences into commodities.

In a darkly funny move in the poem Lives in Accrual Accounting, Yours and Mine, he pokes at how the analogue fluidity of life and its moments both light and dark might be measured in a digital, tangible way. Not felt but known and catalogued.

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.

Much of what we read here are stories which play with perspectives, from the omniscient narrator who knows the hidden thoughts and motives of secretive people, to the second-person-driven stories that force the reader into the shoes of an unlucky innocent that might, if the dice had been rolled differently, be them.

In an interview with us, translator Tiffany Tsao remarked on the importance of carrying forth the artist’s tone, emotion, and intention: “Finding Leo was immensely difficult, even though it’s one of the shortest ones! It took me months to figure out a version of the last two lines that Norman and I were happy with.”

Working together with the poet himself proved, unsurprisingly, key to delivering a faithful and workable translation.

Translating poetry – an art form that works by playing on words and their meanings, their sounds and their lengths, the ebb and flow of their shape on both the page and the tongue – is arguably the most difficult kind of translation.

But Tsao went to the furthest lengths to ensure Norman’s heart remains tacked to each of these poems, whatever language they are read in. And that is certainly felt, through and through.

In Indonesia, queer people face prejudices and dangers. It is also a nation predominantly Muslim, but with a felt Christian and Catholic presence.

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 these poems.

Norman has the ability to smile and laugh in the face of adversity, to occasionally see the light shining between the gloomy, dark trees.

But there is still fear and nervousness, the need to look over one’s shoulder when risking being who they simply are.

Existence is difficult, and it is made more difficult by cruel external forces forged by other human beings. Through Sergius Seeks Bacchus we feel all of this. Sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we cry.

She also selected and translated poems by a number of Korean authors for ‘Against Healing‘ as part of Tilted Axis Press’s chapbook series Translating Feminisms.

Ordinary Misfortunes unleashes a righteous and terrifyingly astute rage upon Korea’s historical and contemporary traumas. Yoon’s voice sounds distinctly modern yet, in a very real way, this is poetry at its most primal level.

Namely, the use of language to form unexpected and transformative connections between seemingly distinct and unrelated things; an attempt to circumvent the restrictions of everyday speech and voice thoughts and truths that would otherwise evade expression.

She forges links between past and present, tragedy and entertainment, oppressor and victim, connecting the personal to the national, building bridges across continents and forcing language to examine and deconstruct itself.

It opens with News, a response to the tragic Sewol ferry disaster of 2014 that lead to the deaths of 304 people, mostly high school students, in which Yoon employs the odd coincidences of language to convey Korea’s grief and difficulty in coming to terms with such tragedy:

Although only 25 pages in length, Ordinary Misfortunes took me a couple of hours to get through as I found myself having to pause every few lines to stop myself from crying in the middle of a crowded coffee shop.

This is particularly as much of the chapbook confronts the horrendous and sickening injustice of the “comfort women“: young Korean women who were essentially forced to be sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during Japan’s occupation of Korea. 

Testimonies sees Yoon using her poetry to amplify the voices of several former comfort women, taking quotations from their actual testimonies and incorporating them into her poems. She explores this theme further in her collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species. It is brutal and uncompromising and serves as a guide to the deep wounds inflicted on these poor women and on Korea:

However, she’s just as unforgiving and relentless as she calls out the hypocrisy of those Korean men who, as tourists, students or workers in the Philippines, took advantage of the local women This would often lead to getting them pregnant but abandoning them to raise the kids alone, “Do the same men read about comfort women and rage with all of us, keep Bibles in their desks and preach, Violence begets violence?”.

In Hello Miss Pretty Bitch she expands the scope of her anger further, calling out Seth Rogen’s 2014 satire of the North Korean regime, The Interview, for what she takes to be an insensitive and poorly executed attempt to get a quick laugh out of the decades-long dictatorship:

“freedom always prevails/which is why we get to see/two Americans/incinerate a Korean face/on Christmas/hold our popcorn/and chocolate bars/and laugh as the dictator/explodes in tune/to a pop song’.

Yoon’s writing is spare, unforgiving, and unflinching; her anger honed and focused; each line like a sniper’s bullet and she truly does hit all of her targets with a frightening precision.

Given that the issue of the comfort women still sours relations between Japan and South Korea to this day, as well as the uncertain spectre that North Korea casts over international relations between both Eastern and Western superpowers, Ordinary Misfortunes can legitimately lay claim to the all too often squandered accolades of essential, important and necessary.

Even though I’m a voracious and diverse reader, I still become frozen by poetry. That’s why, until recently, I never attempted to read Alexander Pushkin. This was a mistake. Alexander Pushkin’s poetry is lyrical, beautifully simple, vivid, and endlessly emotive. It can be enjoyed by all readers, regardless of their background in poetry.

And there is now one definitive book of Alexander Pushkin’s poetry, the one book you need to read in order to fully appreciate Alexander Pushkin’s poems: Alexander Pushkin Selected Poetry, translated with complete command and majesty by Antony Wood.

Alexander Pushkin Selected Poetry

Pushkin wrote during what is considered the golden age of Russian poetry (roughly 1800-1830), and since then his works have been broadly considered the very peak of Russian poetic achievement.

He is utterly and completely beloved. And, when approaching the works of a man so revered, it can be daunting knowing where to start reading. When Penguin Classics announced a new collection of Pushkin’s poems in Alexander Pushkin Selected Poetry, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on it and discover the magic of Pushkin for myself.

There’s something clean about picking up a fresh publication rather than digging into an old library of works: it simplifies things, makes them feel shiny and new. And this collection in particular, translated by Antony Wood, makes Pushkin not only exciting and beautiful, but also lays out his poetry in a way that feels like a picturesque walk through the life and works of a genius artist.

This collection is bound together chronologically. It begins with a lengthy and fascinating introduction which tells the story of Pushkin’s life, puts into historical and political context his life and why he wrote, and thoroughly explores his styles of writing.

Pushkin wrote, as this collection includes, lyric poems, narrative poems, and fairy tales. They’re collected here in that order, and within each section is a wide selection of his greatest works.

Alexander Pushkin’s Lyric Poems

The Lyric Poems section of this book presents Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poems in chronological order, beginning with his earliest works at the age of fifteen to his final works during his tumultuous final years (Pushkin was dead before he reached 40).

The section is divided even further into specific periods of his life, each one giving weight and context to his writing. Knowing that he was still a student, or a writer in exile, or a married man, adds welcome clarity and context for readers attempting to understand what he was writing about and why he wrote what he did.

This is part of the reason why Alexander Pushkin Selected Works is such a perfect introduction for readers searching for where to start reading Alexander Pushkin: it provides so much context and detail about his life, and that context is threaded through this chronological collection of his poems.

Whichever poem you read, you know where he was and what state he was in. You can return to the biographical introduction to remind yourself of his situation and ground yourself in each poem. This makes the act of crawling into Pushkin’s head effortless and enjoyable.

Read More: Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Fairytales in Translation

Alexander Pushkin’s Narrative Poems

Beyond his lyric poems, Pushkin also wrote narrative poems. These, I would argue, are his most impressive works – at least, as far as what’s included in this hefty collection. They are stories condensed down into a rhyming and rhythming narrative.

They’re descriptive, mesmerising, and haunting. They utterly transfix the reader, putting them in a meditative state as they read these clear and poignant tales, told with lyrical elegance. At least, that was my experience with them.

Alexander Pushkin’s most famous narrative poem is The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale. It is the final narrative poem in this section, and it tells the story of Peter the Great. It includes, as do all of the narrative poems and fairy tales, an introductory note by translator Antony Wood, giving context and detail to the narrative.

Each of these introductory notes is around a page in length and adds so much welcome background and perspective to each and every poem. This was especially welcome with The Bronze Horseman since I know shamefully little about Peter the Great, whom Petersburg is named after.

The introduction not only explained to me the ruler’s life but also spelled out Pushkin’s own attitude towards the man, helping me to get into Pushkin’s head before diving into the narrative poem. Reading The Bronze Horseman itself was one of the most pleasant reading experiences I’ve had in a while.

It is a transfixing poem, written and translated with so much vibrance and elegance. It bites and soothes and cradles and inspires. I cannot quite express just how much I adored reading this poem.

Read More: Where to Start Reading Haruki Murakami?

Pushkin in Translation

All of this, this wonderful experience of reading Pushkin’s lyric poems, narrative poems, and fairy tales, was made possible thanks to Antony Wood’s superhuman translations. I don’t know Russian, and I don’t know how much it has shifted and changed over the centuries.

I don’t know if it ages the way English does, or if it remains pure like Icelandic and Mandarin, but Wood, here, has managed to inject his translations with modern sensibilities that offer clarity and sharpness, all the while maintaining a romantic sense of poetic beauty.

Translating poetry must be an enormous challenge, and it’s a skill I respect so deeply. Every poem follows, in English, the same rhyme schemes and rhythmic rules it would have in the original Russian, making us feel confident that none of the magic of reading Alexander Pushkin has been lost in translation.

I spent a single warm and blue April day in the garden reading Alexander Pushkin Selected Poetry, and it’s a day I’ll never forget. It transported me, educated me, warmed and soothed me. It welcomed me into the world of Alexander Pushkin and I am so grateful to Antony Wood for that.

If you’re scratching your head and wondering where to start reading Alexander Pushkin, pick up Alexander Pushkin Selected Poems. It will dispel all fears and worries you might have about exploring the library of one of the world’s most beloved poets.

The way that this book has been organised and structured, and the strength of Wood’s translation, makes for the ultimate Pushkin reading experience.

They can also be very hard to penetrate; they can intimidate and confuse us. For some, that confusion comes from a general fear that they can’t understand the poet’s mind. For others, it’s down to simply not relating with a particular poet or poem.

“Is there anything that works that isn’t a machine for killing, or doomed to collapse, or stolen from the sweat of the hungry?”

With Soft Science, Franny Choi has written a collection of carefully-curated themed poems which combines science-fiction with the presentation of queer people, people of colour, and immigrants within modern Western society.

Does this make it more or less relatable and penetrable? Well, that’s up to you. As someone who is certainly not deemed part of a minority in the West, I thought I had nothing to personally connect me to these poems. But I was wrong; what I had was my humanity (and a great love of sci-fi).

Dark Allegories

In a recent interview with NPR, Choi herself said, “As someone who is a child of immigrants, as a queer person of colour, we’re always trying to pass the Turing test, always trying to use language in order to convince others that we should be treated as human.”

This more-or-less sums up the approach of this collection of poems. What we have here are deeply personal life experiences from the perspective of a queer POC, fed through a filter of science and science-fiction, making them abstract and off-kilter and, at times, fun.

Each poem examines the relationship between people of different colours, genders, and sexualities within the human race, and uses the Blade Runner philosophy of examining what it means to be conscious, to have a soul, to have free thought and conscience – to be human.

It asks us – especially white people – to be honest about whether or not we see every human as equal, even today. Is our moral code as fair as we think it is? Speaking only for myself, I certainly hope so. But I’m always trying to be better.

“When they say they saved me from the landfill as if I could rot as if they didn’t make us to last and last.”

Soft Science asks us to consider the sum of our parts: where do we come from, what makes us, how do we classify ourselves, and why is that important or unimportant? Frequently she references the cyborg, often in the first person. Cyborgs being half-human half-machines made up of many disparate parts. They can be modified and enhanced; they are changeable – like the human mind and body.

The cyborg, as Choi describes it, may be an immigrant who has lost their culture but also does not fit in where they are now, and so feels like a child of nowhere. It may be a trans person who does not feel accepted nor comfortable in their own skin. Or it may simply be all of us, ever-changing, made up of star stuff.

I, Robot

The sci-fi influence in Choi’s collection goes beyond the themes and topics of the poems but also into their layout and structure. Reading the poems aloud, the reader will find themselves stopping and starting at awkward intervals, using broken and half-constructed sentences that mimic those of a robot on the fritz or a half-finished AI from an old sci-fi film.

The effect here is fun, but it also again makes us consider ourselves. The language of an immigrant struggling to communicate, or of a queer person fighting against the pain of pronouns, is all felt and expressed here to great effect. Choi plays with punctuation, spacing, and the blank page in an inventive way that is at once clearly evocative of science fiction but also clearly effective as a contender against the language we take too often for granted.

“Most days, I’m thankful to be seen.”

The collection is also perfectly ordered, with each section being introduced by a Turing Test poem: a discussion between the scientist and the machine.

As we go deeper, the machine’s vocabulary becomes more complex, its questions and thoughts more abstract. This growth helps frame the collection as more than just a group of disparate thoughts but also as a narrative – a discourse, even, between us and the machine. Between us and each other.

Conclusion

With all poetry, our mileage may vary. There may be some who could be tempted to cast Soft Science aside because they don’t care for sci-fi or because they don’t feel that they can relate to it. I might be too bold in saying so, but I believe that to be careless.

There is a kindness to be learned from these poems. It’s a lesson in empathy, where we must learn to love the other a little more and judge the self with a little more honesty. We are all human, and we can each of us find ourselves in difficult positions – geographically, culturally, linguistically, sexually.

We can all, if we have the courage, be a little more introspective and ask ourselves, as Cylon Six does at the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, are you alive?

If you’re looking to read more queer culture through a unique lens then we recommend My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Nagata Kabi or Sergius Seeks Baccus, queer poetry by Norman Erikson Pasaribu.