Named one of the Best Books of 1987 by Library Journal

Selected by Utne Reader as part of its Alternative Canon in 1998

One of Hungry Mind Review's Best 100 Books of the 20th Century

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This edition, coming March 1, 2022, will be a more condensed edition, containing only the original text from 1987, and will be at a more accessible price point for readers. For those looking for a scholarly context to this crucial work, the Critical Edition is currently available.

The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful...all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this new mestiza in bold, experimental writing. -- The Village Voice

Anzaldúa's pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America. -- Women's Review of Books

Part poetry book, part coffee table art book, part spell book, It Is Always A Circle dives deep into the cycles that make up human experience. The poems track the reader's journey from death into life, from despair into hope. Each page filled with original linocuts, drawings, musings, and poems by artist Aleah Black.

An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.

Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that's based on human memory. If the poet's last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true?

In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition--Tears / were tears, mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. Yet the world's still / so beautiful . . . Sometimes // it is . . . And it was enough. And it still can be.

COVID, institutionalization, coming out, and Kurtz and Marlowe's relationship in Heart of Darkness are among many of the topics that Ollie Shane discusses in Notes From the Void. Like in Brute by Emily Skaja, and fellow Wild Ink writer Johnny Francis Wolf's Men Unlike Others, honesty and a painstakingly observant view of their subjects is what guides them through the work. Come for the transparency about mental health; stay for the numerous literary references.

Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions. It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most.

Courtney Peppernell understands that healing is a process, and Pillow Thoughts II--second in the Pillow Thoughts series--eloquently captures the time and experience that one goes through on their journey to peace through restoration.

A collection of inspirational and comforting poems for anyone who is mending from a broken heart.

Winner of the 2023 Trio Award, Christian Gullette's Coachella Elegy explores the queer promised lands and poolside utopias of the American West even as they are threatened by environmental destruction. With precision and clarity, Gullette's poems wander the desert landscape of California, reveling in its beauties and challenging its sacred myths. His speaker seamlessly transports us from a hospital room where his husband battles cancer to the Palm Springs oasis where the vacationing couple celebrates survival. But their days of mimosas and the spirit of unrestraint are haunted by tragedy-the death of a young brother, the danger of climate change. In this utterly original debut, Gullette casts a dream world that doesn't erode, doesn't mold, a story of pleasure against the odds, a story of endurance. Coachella Elegy is a lament for what is lost, and also an unforgettable song of hope and renewal.

In the deepest, most enchanting part of the forest, a creature hands you a seed. Within the seed is your soul, ready to be grown again.

From internationally bestselling author Courtney Peppernell comes her new book of poetry and prose, Watering the Soul. In true Peppernell style, the book is divided into sections, this time following a step-by-step recipe, to heal your soul. Filled with themes that focus on forgiveness, gratitude, togetherness, and equality, Peppernell takes you on a journey to find a precious yet profound understanding; that a seed is not grown with haste and nor is becoming whole, that in each and every step, we find the meaning of watering the soul.

This is the story of your soul and how it can be grown again.

2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

2021 FINALIST FOR THE PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARD FOR TRANS AND GENDER-VARIANT LITERATURE

Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 BY LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY

Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster's crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.

Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author's pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf's voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.

Punks is utterly brilliant ... Keene's masterfully inventive inquiry of self and history is queered, Blackened and joyously thick with multitudes of voice and valence. --Tyehimba Jess

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS and grief through sorrowful songs that we sing as hard as we live. At home in countless poetic forms, Punks reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry. This collection was the 2022 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
John Keene (born 1965) was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works: including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene is the recipient of many awards including the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Whiting Foundation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the American Book Award. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

An astounding debut.
--Adrienne Raphel, The New York Times Book Review

A dazzling love story in poems about one woman's coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone
A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She writes poems in the prevailing style. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real.

One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. She falls into a consuming affair--into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom, and an enormous surge of desire that lets her leave herself behind.

Maggie Millner's captivating, seductive debut is a love story in poems that explores obsession, gender, identity, and the art and act of literary transformation. In rhyming couplets and prose vignettes, Couplets chronicles the strictures, structures, and pitfalls of relationships--the mirroring, the pleasing, the small jealousies and disappointments--and how the people we love can show us who we truly are.

An endlessly inventive, wise, exhilarating book.
--Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

Steeped in loss--of climate and childhood, of fathers and friends--Winter of Worship finds survival in our tender human connections.

Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli's fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the litter swirled around us--a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in ghazals, Marble Runs, and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends. Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes all electronica and / glitch step. We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner's forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name. From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn, these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose an ounce of gentleness.

A beautifully raw and poignant collection of poetry and prose, Pillow Thoughts III continues the series from poet Courtney Peppernell. Fix yourself a warm drink and settle into Peppernell's words as she pens a tribute to her readers who are bravely continuing their journey from hurt to healing.

This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig--farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law--to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power.

Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons. Collectively, these poems, borne of Sax's obsession, offer a varied picture of what it means to be a human being. Delivered in a variety of forms, infused with humor, grace, sadness, and anger, Pig is a wholly unique collection from a virtuosic and original poet.

This collection of poetry asks a kaleidoscope of questions: Who is my family? My father? How do I love a mother no longer here? Can I see myself? What does it mean to be Bangladeshi? What is a border? Innately hopeful and resolutely strong, Fariha's voice turns to the optimism and beauty inherent in rebuilding the self, and in turn, the world that the self moves through. Ubiquitous to the human experience, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination is an illuminating breath of fresh air from a powerful poetic voice.

Just as moving and endearing as Peppernell's previous books, I Hope You Stay is a reminder of the resilience and hope needed after heartache and pain. The book is divided into five sections, with poems ranging from free verse to short form. These words are a light in the deepest hours of the night: Hold on. The sun is coming.

Subject to Change is an anthology celebrating the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry and interviews, this collection is a testament to the power of trans poets speaking to one another--about family, race, class, disability, religion, and the body. This anthology includes a range of trans experiences and poetics, expanding the possibilities of what it means to be both trans and a writer in the twenty-first century.

-----

Subject to Change is revolutionary, a culture and power border-smasher & a piercing examination of brilliant, painful, and transcendent Trans consciousness and experience. It is personal document, a set of trans community-journey notations and an at-the-edge howl of love for love. Each poet goes beyond poetry, that is, beyond being the gendered & genre-ed. Each writer calls out a manifesto against death, against being pulled apart, against frozen progressive social movements and the homelessness of being. What does Freedom, Bravery, Self-realization look like? Enter these five poets--their questions, their investigations, their bodies on paper, their humanity. A superb diamond, in motion. I love this book. You will too.

-- Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2016-17

Currently, there are 557 anti-trans bills across 42 states, along with 45 national bills aiming to block trans people from any and all human rights. Additionally, there are 293 anti-Palestinian bills. These bills share many commonalities; they impact far more people than just the targeted identities listed on them and are crafted by the same individuals. They collectively propel us towards fascism. The same trend can be observed with cop cities, anti-abortion bills, and numerous other initiatives propelled forward by white Christian nationalists.

Desecrated Poppies, written during the eclipse in April 2024 and in anticipation of the November 2024 elections, delves into the intersections of anti-trans and anti-Palestine politics, illustrating how they intertwine with fascism. Through essays and poetry, Yaffa navigates their experiences of these seemingly conflicting identities, both of which are weaponized to advance fascism. Desecrated Poppies also explores antidotes to fascism, with a particular focus on cultural work and the imperative to prioritize the most marginalized among us. A world beyond fascism exists, and we hold the pathway forward.