Results by title

Chronicling reproduction and parenting within a lesbian relationship, this poetry collection reveals both the anxieties and awe inspired by rearing children. 

In her frank, vulnerable third book of poetry, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers considers queer kinship through scientific, cultural, and personal lenses. Bad Cell presents perspectives on family and inheritance that are at once granular and comprehensive. From a pregnant woman being mistaken as a man by a store clerk to some “FAQs Re: Queers & Reproduction” that dispel stereotypes, the collection celebrates the fluidity of gender.

Early in the volume, Rogers addresses the emotional and physical complications of fertility treatment and pregnancy loss, a medical journey that, though harrowing, is gorgeously rendered in taut lyric language. Later, in forms like the abecedarian, definition poem, questionnaire, haibun, and a sonnet crown, the poet looks at how cells themselves—the stuff of life—divide and recombine. As in previous collections, Rogers leans into science-inspired verse, showcasing her talent for turning small-scale mechanics into meaningful metaphors. 

The book also supports an openness to neurodivergence in children: “I want to assemble / something that can speak / for everyone,” says the speaker of “Apraxia.” And Rogers does, with the skill of a seasoned poet and essay writer, whose eye for the particularness of the world is encompassing and gives new insight into the experience of parenting: “But I’m not mom, I tell / writers who think I’ve gone soft, given up deeper subjects. As if these wild, / xenogeneic offspring aren’t a full-on wrestle with the deep.”

A breathtaking gallop through spectral planes, grief, and ghosts

Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?

A groundbreaking examination of how twentieth-century African American writers use queer characters to challenge and ultimately reject subjectivity 
 

Black Queer Flesh reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “Black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past. 

Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting Black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past.

Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to Black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more. 

    Hailed for his humor and passion, the internationally acclaimed performance artist Tim Miller has delighted, shocked, and emboldened audiences all over the world. Body Blows gathers six of Miller’s best-known performances that chart the sexual, spiritual, and political topography of his identity as a gay man: Some Golden States, Stretch Marks, My Queer Body, Naked Breath, Fruit Cocktail, and Glory Box. In Body Blows, Tim Miller leaps from the stage to the page, as each performance script is illustrated with striking photographs and accompanied by Miller’s notes and comment.
    This book explores the tangible body blows—taken and given—of Miller’s life and times as explored in his performances: the queer-basher’s blow, the sweet blowing breath of a lover, the below-the-belt blow of HIV/AIDS, the psychic blows from a society that disrespects the humanity of lesbian and gay relationships. Miller’s performances are full of the put-up-your-dukes and stand-your-ground of such day-to-day blows that make up being gay in America