They've sequenced each poem to flow seamlessly to the next and there were surprises that made me re-read, read aloud, and read to friends on the phone. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. This Pride month, a new anthology featuring the work of queer poets such as Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong and Kae Tempest is “questioning and redefining what we mean by a ‘queer’ poem”. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. One Sunday morning, his father took him and his brothers to jog and play soccer on a badminton court nearby.

personally, my favourite section was ‘queer relationships’, and my favourite poems (always a tough decision!The problem with this anthology starts with the term "queer" and how it misrepresents "queer" poetry because of its "parameters" -- namely, included poets must have had a publication published in the UK. There were so many beautiful poems, this is definitely the type of book you’ll want to annotate (if you like to! All in all this is a "very safe" anthology in which, as Keith Vaughan once wrote, "the lights are on" yet there is little "illumination. Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?

Some of my favorites from this collection include "Afterwards" by Carola Luther, "Philomela: Nest building" by Seni Seneviratne, "Reasons for Staying" by Ocean Vuong, and "Shake My Future" by Dorothea Smartt. Mary Jean Chan then takes over and shares the parameters they used as well as how the anthology is structured in terms of various themes as well as suggestions for reading the poems. All in all, I did enjoy the anthology as a collection of poems and, if I still have life left in me, look forward to their implicated follow-up anthology in 10 years time. Thank you to NetGalley, Mary Jean Chan, Andrew McMillan and Vintage for this DRC in exchange for an honest review.The year's most notable anthology is 100 Queer Poems , edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan. 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”.

Also I’m aware I’ve spoken more about the approach of the anthology as a whole than any individual poem but … it’s hard to know how else to speak about an anthology. Honestly I could see this becoming a book series because there are just so many great queer poets out there that can be added to these. Overall it was pretty solid but not as emotional as I was anticipating and that's a big thing for poetry with me. For me this is a real missed opportunity to actually showcase some exceptional LGBTQ+ poets and truly say something. Many of the poems are not explicitly ‘queer’ so there is an undercurrent of take the poem your own way, which I really loved.I admit that I rarely read poetry though always feel that I should try to incorporate more in my reading. The collection is cleverly themed so that we can see thoughts on gay life from a youthful point of view into older age, from the domestic to the international. I suspect the previous text it’s referencing is The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, a collection with a very, very different approach, that feels as rooted in its time as Sappho does in hers. And there are some major omissions from the canon of English queer poetry -- no James Kirkup, Adam Johnson, Dirg Aaab-Richards, Neil Powell, or Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Vita Sackville-West: significant poets with poems published in the UK by the Gay Men's Press, J.