Physical has been translated into French, Galician and Norwegian editions, with double-editions of physical & playtime published in Slovak and German in 2022. The time after physical is still so odd to me, so strange and warped. It’s only really in the last year or two that I’ve managed to get my head around it. I knew of a certain part of the poetry world, because my dad is also a poet, and a broadcaster, and I grew up in a house where the family was supported by someone doing poetry. So I knew about that freelance life of poetry, the gigs, the residencies, the commissions, the sense of poetry as an art form which could be facilitated in communities of all different sorts. And then later, I knew of the T.S. Eliot Prize, as some sort of distant thing given to these elder statespeople of poetry. I knew vaguely of some other parts of it, but the world I was suddenly thrust into, through the delightful, mad ride physical went on, I wasn’t really prepared for. I’d never heard of the Guardian First Book Award before I was shortlisted, things like the Costa, the Dylan Thomas, even the Poetry Book Society just weren’t really on my radar, and so each one was a strange arrival, my editor calling me up to tell me the good news. Being pulled into the whirl of events, readings, losing, winning, and then also just getting on with life at the side of all that, because poetry is what it is, it still happens on the sidelines of other things. The morning after I won the Guardian First Book Award I got a 5 a.m. train with a horrible hangover and went to teach my first year poets at my lecturing job up in Liverpool. 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.

Three months before he was born the Romanian dictator and his wife were executed before a firing squad. To this day his mother still talks about it. Writers at York and the department of English and Related Literature are proud to host this special poetry reading and launch event, in honour of 100 Queer Poems - an anthology edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan and published earlier this year by Vintage. The awkward and rigid binaries of heterosexual relationships are examined through a piteous lens, and the secrets of frightened, closeted gay married men are exposed.The anthology is split into various sections, covering everything from domesticity and history to the city and nature. The poem asks a number of questions, says Bernard: “What has passed away and what will transpire? Can we allow for a radical inner transformation that appears ugly to us, or that might render us undesirable?” I remember first coming across the seminal Staying Alive anthology published by Bloodaxe Books, and carrying it around with me for weeks because the physical object of the anthology offered me a kind of solace and reassurance that still feels miraculous to me. There were poets I knew and loved whose work I relished reading again, and others whose poetry I only discovered because they were in conversation with names I already recognised. 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.

Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. It deserves a place on the shelf of every reader keen to discover and rediscover how queer poets speak to one another across the generations. 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.This gorgeously titled collection, separated into two halves, is an exploration of queer lives, loves, and families. 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.” As he approached his twenty-third birthday, for some reason he felt that he was male. And he saw it wasn’t bad.

Increasingly invested in poetry, Hyatt appeared in underground magazines and anthologies throughout the 1960s, including Michael Horovitz’s countercultural document Children of Albion (1969) . He was also in and out of psychiatric hospitals, sufferin These are relatable experiences but the way that Jason digests and expels them gives them a new light, and a possible new way for you to understand them. 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. There is a focus here on growing a family as queer people: pregnancy and birth and raising children.Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, winner of the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry. Their second collection Bright Fear is forthcoming from Faber.