Blog Posts tagged with "LGBTQ"

3 Posts

Authors / What Matters Most

Jos Charles' a Year & other poems is a door left open to form, fire, and fate

Briana Gwin — 06/28/2023

The year is 2021, and wildfires are ravaging the West Coast. America is in lockdown, and time as we know it has come to a grinding halt.

 

Enter the poet Jos Charles, whose seminal collection of poems, feeld, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and just recently, one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature” in the New York Times Style Magazine. Charles is a trans artist, and no stranger to devastation—so it comes as no surprise that their followup act, a Year & other poems, is as unprecedented as the…

Authors / What Matters Most

On K Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco—an elegy, an ode, an opening

Briana Gwin — 06/16/2023

“In the beginning, yes, a garden. As lush as you’re imagining.” So begins K. Iver’s tender and heart-wrenching debut; what follows is a coming of age story of creation and demise, a love story upended by suicide. The collection’s fleeting first images of doting parents (a fantasy), dogwoods in bloom, a boy—later referred to by the poems’ speaker as Missy—who “looks at you the way someone must have when you were born” quickly give way to images of a paternal pattern of abuse, the cold interior of a psychiatric hospital, a mental-health-crisis-turned-exorcism, and in a poem called “god,” a closed-casket…

Authors / Interviews

5 Reasons to Teach This Book: Wound from the Mouth of a Wound

Bailey Hutchinson — 12/08/2020

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re featuring the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry winner, torrin a. greathouse and her debut full-length collection of poetry, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a deftly transformative text—one that resonates with prosodic brilliance. torrin’s formal variety is electric enough on its own, but combined with her stinging imagery and unreserved depictions of disability, physical…