The Tradition is a lesson in the power of craft… read more

Recently in LGBTQ news…… read more

“[…] our love of the immortality of poems can be dangerous if it narrows our aspirations as poets and if it narrows our ideas about what a poem can do.”… read more

Julie Marie Wade on Jericho Brown’s latest poetry collection The New Testament… read more

“For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive.”… read more

In this in-depth discussion, poets Rickey Laurentiis and Darrel Alejandro Holnes examine categorization in the NYC social scene and in queer literature today…. read more

One-hundred pages into Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses, I stopped thinking of it as a book and started thinking of it as a party. At the party, I was the guest of honor and all of the poets kept telling me how much they loved my hair—as a woman, reading Divining Divas… read more

FIERCE—Middle English: from Old French fiers ‘fierce, brave, proud,’ from Latin ferus ‘untamed.’ Compare with feral. The word “fierce” is in danger of being defanged. Somewhere in between Tyra Banks throwing “fierce” around like used fake eyelashes and President Obama campaigning as a “fierce advocate” in spite of his galling ambiguity (and that’s a rather… read more

Brown is a generous writer—he never forgets his audience, never turns his back or forgets that you’ve paid your admission.  He starts by explaining himself, opening the collection with an ars poetica, “Track 1: Lush Life.”  It begins, “The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you” (7).   Like one of Dante’s tormented, he has… read more