poetry

The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World's Classics)

The Flowers of Evil, which T.S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking of sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. Including the French texts and comprehensive explanatory notes to the poems, this extraordinary body of love poems restores the six poems originally banned in 1857, revealing the richness and variety of the collection.

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.

Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns

Andrea Gibson's dynamic and timely new book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns is a energetic collection of stirring and introspective poetry. Hauntingly vivid, the poems voyage through a soldier's lingering psychological wounds, to the curious questions of school children on the meaning of "hate", to a lover's witty and vibrant description of longing. Gibson's poems deconstruct the current political climate through stunning imagery and careful crafting. With the same velocity, the poignant and vacillating love poems are equally capable of sweeping the air out of the room. Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns has a bold and unforgettable internal voice and is rich with the kind of questioning that inspires action.

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 Canon: The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (Hellenic Studies)

This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.

Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories--Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European--and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.

Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."

King of Shadows

Based on the author's life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin's coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.

Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

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."