Meanwhile, Fan was surprised when Chan and McMillan chose his poem Hokkaido for the book, but says when he thought about it, it made sense. He made it into the best high school in the city – where the government officials sent their kids. His only friend from middle school started avoiding him. The bud of loneliness blossomed into first love. Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past.

Based on my personal experience here, the literary communities are often allergic to anything autobiographical,” said Pasaribu, whose short story collection Happy Stories, Mostly, translated by Tiffany Tsao, was longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize. “When I was starting publishing my writing, people would focus on the things they considered autobiographical and talk about them as if they were the weakness of my writing. So I thought it would be fun to be naughty about it by employing a tauntingly autobiographical title, a curriculum vitae.” They encourage us to think differently about queer identity, abuse, depression, oppression, hope, and relief. They offer us empathy and ask for it in return. McMillan and Chan are both acclaimed poets themselves – McMillan has won the Guardian first book award, the Somerset Maugham award and the Polari prize for his work, while Chan’s debut collection Flèche won the 2019 Costa poetry award.The poems in this collection are transportive. They take you somewhere else entirely. They truly demonstrate the beauty of poetry, in every sense of that word.

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. In 2021, Flèche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, they currently live in Oxford. The power of the anthology, said Bernard, is that it “showcases each poem and poet doing something interesting with the subject in their historical context”. He didn’t say much and only learned to read when he was finishing second grade. In front of a friend of his mother’s, the mother of one of his friends dubbed him ‘the stupid one’. His mother’s friend told his mother and when he was grown up, his mother told him. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard.

Vuong’s second poetry collection, Time Is A Mother, was written after the death of his mother. It’s a collection about love, family, queerness, modern American life, and many other topics. Some of the neighbours forbade their kids from playing with him and his brothers because his family was Batak and Christian. There is a wider breadth to the wanderings of these poems, too, as they concern themselves with the broad strokes of love as it exists today. also - please do not skip the introductions! there is a real sense of comfort provided from them, especially as you move through the collection. not all of the poems are explicitly queer, but you can rest easy knowing that they are, and they were chosen for that reason.

it’s safe to say i loved this poetry collection. i devoured it in a matter of hours (no matter how many poetry loyalists say not to do that, i simply could not stop myself). it is so beautifully collated and expressed, and is a real testament to random house/vintage, andrew mcmillan, mary jean chan, and the poets. it made me laugh, it made me cry, but most of all, it left me entirely speechless. Some poems are grounded in his life and experiences; others are incredibly, beautifully abstract. They communicate through tone and emotion and language, even if the theme or concept isn’t clear. Meanwhile Bernard’s poem Hiss came about because they were “thinking about all of the burned buildings [they] have seen or entered, how it feels to stand upright below an uncertain roof, how such buildings appear as both inside and outside, as both ruin and vitrine”. This book is a celebration of exuberant queer poetics, and it’s very special because of that Norman Erikson Pasaribu

There is a focus here on growing a family as queer people: pregnancy and birth and raising children. Despite his tumultuous relationship with religion, the impact it has had on Norman and his writing is painted widely across his poetry. He decries its ability – its willingness – to abandon queer people, to make pariahs of them. This collection is kind of like being at a party: you’re glad it’s happening and you’re glad to have been invited, you feel warmly towards the hosts, and you can kind of figure out broadly why this group of people has been brought today. It’s lovely to run into some dear old friends. There may, however, also be the occasional frenemy. And while most of the new acquaintances you make are exciting and leave you curious to spend more time with them, you’ll also just fail to connect with others. queer poems’ is split into seven sections, which i admit i was dubious of first (for how can one define poetry?) but they make perfect sense, and have a real balance to them. one thing in particular i loved was the inclusion of translated works, which are so often overlooked in poetry collections, but hold such beauty. this was a fantastic choice. It is a collection that begins with a celebration of queer sex, lust, and desire, before moving into how we build our families and friendships. How things fall apart, and how we mend ourselves.

There will be at least one poem in this collection of queer poetry that will make you cry. It might be one that speaks specifically to the queer experience, or something more abstract that hits you just right with its language and tone. They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.” The first thing he learned at school, as he watched the girls during break, was that there was a girl inside him. He believed that when he grew up his penis would expire and her breasts would sprout. A diverse and gratifying new anthology of LGBTQ+ verse... this is an abundantly rich and rewarding collection, capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations attitude

It also a wonderful pair of introductions from the editors—this would be the sort of thing I normally skip over but, in this case, they serve as a kind of mission statement for the collection (and the line right at the beginning from Andrew McMillan about the poems of Thom Gunn make him feel, for the first time, that “who I was might be worth of poetry, worth of literature” hit me hard and immediately in the feels). Specifically, the editors interrogate what a queer poem is—what it means to call something a queer poem—before reminding us that the collection is 100 Queer Poems, not 100 Poems about Queerness, a distinction that one that helped me guide through the collection as it moves thematically through various spaces of queerness, from ones that feel very rooted in selfhood (like adolescence, domesticity and relationships) to ones that look outwards, into the world and into the future (the last section explicitly being called Queer Futures). When he was little he fell from a tree. Ever since, his first memory of his father was himself in school uniform, squatting on the toilet. This stemmed from his first day of school – he was five and right before they set off he told his father he needed to poop.