“…I don’t think feeling fragmented is necessarily a thing to seek to eliminate! Feelings, even unpleasant ones, can be a source of knowledge and intelligence.”… read more

Following up her 2014 novel, He Mele A Hilo, Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul is Ryka Aoki’s first book dedicated completely to poetry. It collects her 2010 chapbook sequence about Los Angeles, Sometimes Too Hot The Eye Of Heaven Shines, and an older long poem, “No More Hiroshimas,” together with three new… read more

“I feel there’s not a whole lot of support for trans writers–but it’s changing. And it’s changing not because [of the publishers], but because a lot more trans poets are pushing for this to happen…”… read more

The angst and transcendence of that unique point in a transitioning person’s life—the last days that they exist in their birth gender, aware something shattering is emergent beneath the surface— is rarely captured so well as with the clarity and grace of Joy Ladin’s Impersonation. Written as part of a poetry triptych that includes Transmigration… read more

Eileen Myles gets her due, Myles E. Johnson gives us a book for young black queer boys, and more LGBT news… read more

The book develops and deploys a sophisticated analysis of structural oppression, through the related categories of racism, exploitation, colonialism and transphobia, and of the ways this plays out as personal experience… read more

This week in the LGBTQ-themed arts… read more

This week, a poem by Joy Ladin…. read more

“Taken as a whole, the pulse behind Gephyromania is that of a seeker who finds meaning not in what is found, but in the act itself.”… read more

The title of Joy Ladin’s 2009 Transmigration suggests the collection’s key themes: death, rebirth, the soul and its passing in and out of the body, transition. Written, as the introductory note explains, “during the hardest part of [Ladin’s] transition from living as a man to living as a woman,” the poems cohere into a narrative… read more