Whether you’re a poet yourself or just beginning to dip your toe into the medium, we have curated a list for you to catch up on the best queer poetry releases of 2024! Check this list out for what you missed this year, and you can seek them out and then discuss them at your New Year’s Eve parties so you can sound educated and sophisticated (and hot). Buy yourself or someone else in your life one (or more, or all!) of these books, and support queer writers as we head into the New Year.
Good Dress by Brittany Rogers (Tin House Books)
Queer Black femme poet Brittany Rogers’ debut book Good Dress is a love story and coming-of-age set against the backdrop of Detroit. The book is a love letter to the city, that pulls no punches about its beauty and its pain. Navigating a strong female lineage in a city whose Black history is marked by the Great Migration, Rogers looks at the internal and external with grace and power. The poems are intimate, nostalgic, and investigative, carrying the speaker through a journey of Black womanhood and the question of what it means to “belong” to a city or a place. Called a “once-in-a-generation debut” by Angel Nafis, this book holds the mastery of an established pen.
Read the poem “Detroit Pastoral”
What Good Is Heaven by Raye Hendrix (Texas Review Press)
Another stunning debut, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven follows a young speaker navigating her bisexual identity among the Appalachian foothills. In particular the speaker’s experience of growing up in a rural area on a farm forces her to contend early with the question of violence — witnessing daily violence perpetrated against land and animal, bodily harm against queer bodies begins to feel inherent to the speaker, in that both violences are deemed acceptable by a fierce cisheteropatriarchal country. As deep as water and as soft as grass, these poems “ask what it means to love and be loved by what hurts you, to be implicated in perpetuating the same kinds of harm, and what it means to call such a complicated place your home.”
Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Pivoting away from debuts, Carl Phillips’ latest work enters a long oeuvre of collections that contend with desire, memory, and their implications. Like all Phillips’ books, Scattered Snows, to the North concerns itself with the past — personal and collective — and what the act of reflecting can, and cannot, accomplish. His recognizable voice remains after 17 books, yet never falters or grows tiring — only louder, more confident, more comforting to readers familiar and fresh.
Read the poem “Scattered Snows, to the North”
Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin (Brick Books)
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Known best for her debut novel Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin’s poetry book came to thunderous life this year. A reclamation of Catholic teachings for queer women, Gay Girl Prayers rewrites Bible passages to reflect the complicated experience of growing up gay in a deeply religious social and cultural structure. Rather than a complete takedown of religion, however, this book deconstructs what queer people have been taught to fear about faith and builds it back up into a church that welcomes all through its doors. It rotates a cast of female characters from scripture in such a way that allows them the voice denied them by years of patriarchal corruption, and turns even the queerest among them into the holiest.
Read the poems “John 9:1-12” and “Romans 1:26-27 & Ruth 1:16”
Calligraphies by Marilyn Hacker (W.W. Norton)
Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons remains a bastion of lesbian poetry, and nearly 40 years later her book Calligraphies reminds us why. Described as a “tribute to exiles and refugees,” Hacker observes the language we use for revolution, rebellion, and identity, and catalogs a personal history against a backdrop of global unrest and pandemic. Her control of the crown sonnet and ghazal forms is so seamless, you forget the formal layers that ring around the collection like a great big beautiful old oak.
Read the poem “Calligraphies VI”
Bluff by Danez Smith (Graywolf)
If you’re reading queer poetry but don’t know Danez Smith’s name, I don’t know what to tell you other than to get your shit together. Smith’s latest collection reckons with the violent venn diagram of Minneapolis in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine coinciding with George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests that followed. Not only do these poems illustrate the brutality of that summer and its echoes, they find Smith questioning their responsibility as a Minneapolis native to document. Smith contends with the artform of poetry itself, in that it too is not free from unchecked capitalism and white supremacy, even as it is the medium the poet turns to again and again. All of Smith’s collections are brilliant, but there is something in Bluff that feels like a car not just turning around, but growing wings and taking flight.
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad (Wave Books)
An arguable icon of ecopoetics, CAConrad speaks with a voice seemingly ancient and omnipotent. This latest iteration is something of a gospel of the Anthropocene, engaging with extinction and regeneration — how nature, despite how we brutalize it, bounces back in new and exhilarating ways, an ecological boomerang. In an interview, CAConrad describes their poems as “breathing wild creatures. They stand on the bottom of the page, vibrating in the center of their bodies. If they were to come off the page to live with me, I would work hard to buy a house with many rooms. We would share a large bed; if they learned to jump back on the page when needed, I could take them wherever I went!” Their familiar intelligent absurdity is at ease with disruption, but never do they feel unreachable. On the contrary, each book of theirs builds a fresh lexicon to help us fall back in love with the world around us, that helps us “to / desire / the world / as it is.” An essential and irretrievable poetic icon.
impact statement by Jody Chan (Brick Books)
In impact statement, Jody Chan disrupts the colonial nature of the Western medical system, reimagining a future of a “queer, disabled, abolitionist” community whose notions of care refuse methods of care encouraged by carceral capitalism. This collection utilizes “patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents” to examine the racist practice of psychiatric institutions, questioning what constitutes disability when it is defined by a corrupt capitalist system that prioritizes health only as a means of production. The collection, however, recognizes too the optimism of community care, through means of abolition and mutual aid.
I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize, as well as a clinical psychologist, Sanah Ahsan’s debut reflects the poet’s fierce intelligence, soft compassion, and powerful sense of justice. Their creative work is clearly influenced by their scholarly work, in that they both deconstruct whiteness and madness, questioning what we do and can mean to each other in an emotionally turbulent and politically distressed existence. I cannot be good until you say it reflects on the Quranic verse as much as it does Ahsan’s clinical psychology studies, refusing binary and embracing “the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence.”
Read the poem “There is No Belief Without Unbelief”
I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (Alice James Books)
The title of Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s I Don’t Want to Be Understood is the rallying cry of the collection itself: in a cultural climate that seeks to “normalize” transness, Espinoza’s verse revolts. In these poems, transness is neither a corrupting evil nor a neoliberal act of bravery — it is its own entirety, fighting against the idea that it must be understood, while also reckoning with the loneliness of mis- or lack of understanding. Espinoza recognizes in transness, as well as womanhood or broadly personhood itself, to seek to be known is often a futile act, no matter the identity of the individual grieving for it. A tour de force of poetic voice, Espinoza does it again.
If you’re interested in hearing more about this title, read this review from our beloved Drew Burnett Gregory.
Read the poem “Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star”
DEED by torrin a. greathouse (Wesleyan University Press)
An exploration of canon across genre, paying homage and then questioning that homage as a trans, disabled poet whose communities have not traditionally been loved by those within the canon, DEED is a formal collection of luminous magnitude. Desire is the crux of these poems, who navigate the silt of a complex, complicated word’s history and meaning. greathouse is a master of a variety of forms in this collection, all of which call upon the violence and tenderness of desire — how we experience it as individuals, as a collective, as a culture. Described by its publisher’s website as “an innovative exploration of desire and its cost,” DEED’s mission to “write an honest poem about desire” comes from a noble, necessary voice in queer poetics.
Read the poem “Ekphrasis on Nude Selfie as Portrait of Saint. Sebastian”
