Thank you to NetGalley, Mary Jean Chan, Andrew McMillan and Vintage for this DRC in exchange for an honest review.

This Pride month, a new anthology featuring the work of queer poets such as Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong and Kae Tempest is “questioning and redefining what we mean by a ‘queer’ poem”. Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past.The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and. This is a love it or hate style and, for many, takes some getting used to and, perhaps, is better suited to either performance or a simple recital by a poet to get the flavour of the sound. Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable? His writings have been featured in Atlantic , Harper's Magazine , Nation , New Republic , New Yorker , and the New York Times . In their joint Introduction Andrew McMillan discusses the strategy used in curating this collection: “The last time an anthology like this one came out from a trade publisher was almost four decades ago.

This book is divided into different parts and while I can't say that I liked any part the least, I definitely can say that I like the poems about Queer Future the most. I particularly liked Andrew McMillan's introduction regarding what is queer poetry and how people are labelled.Normally I would prefer an anthology that gives a small selection, 3 or 4 at least, from each poet but given the underlying theme of this particular volume I was prepared to consider 1 poem from each of 100 poets and see where it would lead me. Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. The English poets that represnt queer history are nothing more than a scattering of odd seeds from English poetry: Douglas, Owen, Brooke and Auden's over anthologised "Funeral Blues," made popular via Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Chan and McMillan have thoughtfully curated queer poems that push the boundaries of language, touching upon all sensations — profundity, grief, ecstasy, longing, ambivalence, unease. Why not something as wonderfully shocking as "Distraction" or one of the taut twelve liners in We Have the Melon that Gunn recognised as exemplars of thrilling, sexual queer poetry? Having studied Wilfred Owen "a war poet" at school, I hadnt realised for many years that he was also a "queer poet" and so I found this collection fascinating.Jay Bernard, whose first poetry collection Surge was based on the New Cross fire archives and won the Ted Hughes award, said 100 Queer Poems was “coming at a critical, contradictory juncture: widespread hatred and distrust of trans people alongside huge efforts at representation and inclusion; general acceptance of cis gay and bisexual people yet rising intolerance post-Brexit; an increasingly vocal and visible intersex population, yet few legal rights or protections for them”.

Some of the poems were beautiful and heart-wrenching and others just felt like nothing, unfortunately. One day he eavesdropped on his parents – his father was worried because according to him their firstborn son acted like a girl. Looking around at all the various poetries and range of voices we see being published now, and the twentieth-century voices they’re in conversation with, I began to wonder what a new anthology might look like;” He then goes on to clarify how the word ‘queer’ is used within the anthology.

Meanwhile Bernard’s poem Hiss came about because they were “thinking about all of the burned buildings [they] have seen or entered, how it feels to stand upright below an uncertain roof, how such buildings appear as both inside and outside, as both ruin and vitrine”. un montón de palabras poderosas y de sentimientos y de encontrarse en los márgenes de las cosas (como siempre). Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche , which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.