Poetry

Gay Haiku

Impossible to resist, this hilariously sassy and sweet collection of haiku turns the perilous sport of gay dating into pure poetry.

For hundreds of years, the Japanese haiku has been equated with peaceful contemplation and spiritual enlightenment. A delicate balance of rhythm and line, the haiku has provided countless readers with an appreciation of the changing of the seasons and the miracles of nature. Now, in Gay Haiku, readers can finally appreciate more important things—like the changing of boyfriends and the miracles of shopping.

Irresistible and irreverent, this collection of one hundred and ten witty and wicked short poems captures the many dating disasters of first-time author Joel Derfner. In a wonderfully fresh and original voice, Derfner shamelessly mines his personal life to send up such broad-ranging topics as gay pop culture, politics, family, sex, and, of course, home decorating.

Gay, straight, or undecided, readers will delight in Derfner’s dry sense of humor and unmistakable charm as he tackles the big questions of life.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)

essays & speeches

An Emergence of Green

New to the Los Angeles area, leading a nomadic life of comfort and privilege, Paul and Carolyn Blake are an American success story. Paul is a self-made man who has overcome hardship to achieve a successful business career. Carolyn is the perfect young wife who has made him the envy of other men.

Then Val Hunter and her ten-year-old son move in next door. An artist just coming into her own, she is a startling and unconventional woman on all counts: physically imposing, and with a burgeoning independence of spirit--and a sexuality that breaks through in her passion for Carolyn.

Paul Blake knows a threat when he sees one, and he knows immediately that Val is exceedingly dangerous. She will expose Carolyn to values that will challenge what Carolyn has accepted and taken for granted. He must fight to retain possession of his wife, and fight he will.

An Emergence of Green is a timeless novel of no-holds-barred combat between a man and a woman for the body and soul of the woman they both covet.

This contemporary new edition of a cherished classic is a "powerful addition to gay literature, with characters of a depth and intensity not often found in today's world of disposable supermarket-rack books" (the Advocate).

The House Beautiful

The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the “Turkish Renaissance” manifested itself, to some degree, as an “age of beloveds,” in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.

The authors show that the “age of beloveds” was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About

Winner of the LAMBDA Book Award, Best Lesbian Anthology, and the Out/Write Vanguard Award, Best Pioneering Contribution to the Field of Gay/Lesbian Lifestyle and Literature, this best-selling anthology is the most important book ever published about Chicana lesbians.

A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry

From Greece's forthright Cavafy to France's renegade Genet; from Oscar Wilde's beloved Lord Alfred Douglas to Ginsberg and the Beats; from senior poets such as Harold Norse to the kids who will be writing poems in the new millennium--Gavin Dillard, one of the world's best-loved contemporary poets, has gathered the best of the 20th Century gay poetry "lest it be lost to us except in the lonely vaults of queer archives."

Rave: Poems 1975-1999

The Choir

I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead
look through my own, inaudible
hosannas greet
the panorama charged serene
and almost ultraviolet with so much witness.
Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane
divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun.
Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds,
the garbage truck suspended in shy light,
the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway,
the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm.
Holy the handmade and created side by side,
the sapphire of their marriage,
green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell
rinsed by the buzzing tide.
Holy the light--
the poison ivy livid in its glare,
the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens,
the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques.
The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we,
cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale,
inscrutable until divulged by god
and sex into its gender, every touch
a secret intercourse with angels as we walk
proffered and taken. Their great wings
batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons.
Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs
the shock of the divine crash-landing.
I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail,
the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight
themes of the carbon sea where we are joined:
zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths
crowning the compost heap.

Elegy

Somebody left the world last night, I felt it
so, last minute, last half-breath before the storm
that hit all night last night drew back. Midmorning
windows streaked with mud like sides of ears. How long

the journey? Sails, the windowpanes the black
thick tarp that kept the woodpile. Dry
Southern wind, in minutes clothes bone-hard, clamped
to the line. Clouds heaving in. The sky, the sky, who did arrive

to kiss the eye behind the windswept sheet? Who was it, solo
no longer, shy and desirous to be clean? What song
arose, what crust between the lids
spat and forgot? I woke, my fingers in my eyes

The Monkey's Mask (A Mask Noir Title)

From the pen of one of Australia's most innovative writers comes a totally unique experience. It's a crime thriller. It's where high art meets low life, passion meets betrayal, and poetry faces profanity on the streets of a harsh modern city... A lesbian detective novel in verse form.

Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.

The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.