An anthology of nature poetry by queer authors celebrating the natural world and rethinking the nature poem.

Spanning three centuries, this anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.

In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies and identities . . . Queer Nature remains interested in elements, flora, fauna, habitats, homes, and natural forces--literary aspects of the work that allow queer and trans people to speak within their specific cultural and literary histories of the abnormal, the animal, the elemental, and the unnatural. The anthology features poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Diaz, and June Jordan, as well as emerging voices such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain, Eric Tran, and Jim Whiteside.

Celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Ada Limón's award-winning debut poetry collection, this edition includes a new introduction by the poet that reflects on the book and how her writing practice has developed over time.From the new introduction by the author: I expected to meet a stranger, someone naive and very different than what I remember, but Lucky Wreck is not a stranger at all. Lucky Wreck is me at the beginning, at a doorway. It is, quite simply, where 'I' began.

Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, the essays in Laura Jackson's debut, Deep & Wild, chronicle the beauty and awe of Appalachia through the eyes of a lifelong West Virginian.

Jackson employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson's collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia's rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver's famous song, Take Me Home, Country Roads.

The Worried Well, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is a tragicomic collection that explores the intersection of anxiety and safety in a chaotic world.

Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?

The worried well is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don't manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.

Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, I don't / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again.

New flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection.

I Have Not Considered Consequences delves into the complexities of grief, desire, and a peculiar intersection between humans and bears. Flick's evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton.

In Flick's world, bears don't just roam the wild--they play basketball, dance, and even work as midlevel business professionals. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor.

Named one of the Best Books of 2024 by the New York Public Library, Book of Kin draws on the poet's Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.

Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut poetry collection follows a boy's coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother's poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one's beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.

Featured in Electric Lit's 15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter

Award-winning author Marian Crotty's sophomore collection centers on resilient female protagonists and offers a view into queer life and love outside of its major coastal cities. The characters in Crotty's collection are searching--for understanding, acceptance, or forgiveness.

In the title story, an elderly rape crisis volunteer's advocacy for a survivor leads her to reexamine her role in estrangement from her son; in Halloween, a queer teen is counseled through heartbreak by her unlucky-in-love grandmother; and in Family Resemblance, a group of families whose children share the same sperm donor is disrupted by the arrival of a minor celebrity.

While marginalization, loneliness, and bigotry hover in the distance of Near Strangers, the book's tone is hopeful and invites readers to reflect on our shared human experience with empathy.

Winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith, this collection of formalist poetry is part ode, part elegy, and serves as a heartfelt journey in overcoming grief and falling back in love with the world.

Sunni Brown Wilkinson's second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.

Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That's all there is to take and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.

Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.

Winner of the 2023 Rising Writer Prize, Half-Lives is a playful debut short story collection imagining women's lives in a world free of social limitations.

Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler's collection is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women's bodies and psyches. Lively and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply.

The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives: A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother's studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide

Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa's debut poetry collection explores a son's relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States.

Nebeolisa's poems highlight how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: I don't understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn't want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers? The book questions his Nigerian mother's need to act brave and a son's need to protect.

Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa's mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.

Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman, Ghost Man on Second centers on strained family relationships and the search for new homes.

Erica Reid's debut collection traces a daughter's search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, It's hard to feel at home unless I'm aching. Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid's poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms--including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels--containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points.

Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid's active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.

This young poet demonstrates an uncommon mastery of craft, writing in forms including the sonnet redoublé, sestina, canzone, and villanelle. With all her linguistic skills, Sears's work remains approachable, offering readers a striking blend of honesty, humor, anguish, joy, and surprise. Drawing influence from contemporary poets like Mark Jarman, Erica Dawson, and Tiana Clark, Sears cuts a path of her own.

Entry Level, the debut short story collection of Wendy Wimmer, selected by Deesha Philyaw as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize, focuses on an eclectic cast of characters trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities.

These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed--whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors--and the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying.

Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer's characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.

Murmur, the second poetry collection by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, explores the complexity of race and the body of a Black man in contemporary America.

Barnett's sophomore collection considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man's lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina.

A diagnosis from the poet's infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, like too many Black men, if a heart is not enough to keep me alive.

With disarming charm and good humor, Fuller charts a clear-eyed path for not only accepting but celebrating differences of all kinds. Bigger explores how we want the world to be as large and open as possible for the people we love--and how this kind of love expands our own world too.

The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe asks how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms. In these stories, Woods invites us to question our notions of identity and the stories we tell ourselves to navigate everyday life, and to imagine other paths--joyful, whimsical, even absurd--through the world.

In Amie Whittemore's Nest of Matches, the poems that bask in the beauty of nature, queerness, and love while exploring how dichotomies form identity

This collection is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore's third book of poetry explores the complexities of love--romantic, familial, and love for place--and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: Every habit / even love--strangest / of them all--offers exhaustion / and renewal.

Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon's phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore's work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies--grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity--and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.

Taking to Water, the debut poetry collection by Jennifer Conlon, selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize, questions gender and embraces queerness through the lens of the natural world of North Carolina.

A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon's poetry collection of gender questioning, is 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 religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable.

In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety--wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.

Bittering the Wound by Jacqui Germain, selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize is a firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest.

Part documentation, part conjuring, this debut collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them.

Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes--from mid-protest to post-protest--and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye.