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. Meanwhile, Maureen Duffy, who reworked the visionary medieval poem Piers Plowman in the context of contemporary factory work in her play Pearson/The Lay Off (1956), came out in the early 1960s. Her novel The Microcosm (1966) was set around the lesbian Gateways Club on the Kings Road (featured in the film The Killing of Sister George ). A prize-winning poet since her teens, Duffy wrote "the first modern lesbian love poems, unabashed and unapologetic," as the scholar Alison Hennegan notes. Duffy also campaigned for the government to decriminalize homosexuality, which the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 effectively did 10 years after the recommendations of the landmark Wolfenden Report . 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.

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.

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Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. 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. Plus it felt weird to read 100 poems one after the other for a review, when—all things being equal—I would have more naturally engaged in a book like this by dipping and out, reading by mood and moment (I am not, for example, the sort of person who moves linearly through a museum). The sections that spoke to me most directly to me upon a first reading were, somewhat predicably, Queer Relationships, Queer Landscapes and Queering Histories. But, in general, I found the flow of the poems really fascinating and found the loose thematic framing around aspects of queerness, both as part of the self and part of the world, really resonant. These poems are harrowing and harsh, funny and furious and unsettling and beautiful. They feel so much and make you, in turn, feel exposed and raw and understood and hopeful.

Abundantly rich and rewarding...capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations' Attitude Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. It’s not directly queer or about sexuality, but when they chose it, it immediately gave me a sense of epiphany,” said Fan. “And of course it is about the body and it is about how we experience ourselves being naked.” His initial poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, made such a huge splash that it felt as though the world suddenly held its breath. There is a focus here on growing a family as queer people: pregnancy and birth and raising children.I think one of the odd things is that when a book has demonstrable themes you’re suddenly asked to speak on those subjects, so people ask if I can speak to masculinity, or queer northern identity or whatever it may be. I think partly in those situations there’s a danger that you just begin to paraphrase your own poetry – I once tried to write some essays around those themes that the poetry contains and they never really worked. It’s in the poetry, maybe that’s the only way I know to say it.

I should also say that when I first read physical, it made me cry, and that your book also felt like a friend, even though I hadn’t yet met you at the time. How did you feel after physical came out, when it received such widespread acclaim? Did it make you feel more visible as a queer poet? Did writing playtime and pandemonium feel easier, or perhaps harder, as a result of that? 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. Together they edited 100 Queer Poems, which publishes on 2 June 2022. In this correspondence, undertaken over spring 2022, the authors discuss the state of queer poetry in Britain. The anthology is split into various sections, covering everything from domesticity and history to the city and nature. In a collection that passes across the scope of lives and relationships, The Human Body is a Hivealso moves through the spectrum of human emotion.His father punished him with beatings. One day he eavesdropped on his parents – his father was worried because according to him their firstborn son acted like a girl. He peered into the mirror, to the little girl inside. And he saw it was good.