Hey do you have any poetry you can suggest because I saw your response to that OP, I’d love some stuff to read!
so i started responding to another similar ask by @unitedstates0fdakota but i accidentally posted it when it was incomplete so i decided to continue here! check out that post for the first two recs, george abraham's birthright and romeo oriogun's sacrament of bodies
more than organs, kay ulanday barrett
kay ulanday barrett is a poet, performer, and educator, navigating life as a disabled filipinx-amerikan transgnder queer in the u.s. with struggle, resistance, and laughter. pamela sneed, one of the reviewers quoted on the back of more than organs, describes the collection as about “hunger that is physical, spiritual, and queer”, and i think hunger is an excellent way to put it. i love how the pieces in this collection oscillate between visceral and playful – there’s a poem called “pain, an epistle” but also one called “actually, jenny schecter wasn’t the worst”.
you googled “authentic” / & now are seated next to me. / as I speed walk you to the cart / aunty gives me the last dish / gets the idea that I’ve waited too long / for something to just taste right. / I wish for a dumpling stuff / of bullet skins to be the shrapnel / in every white man’s throat. / go ahead / say the word oriental / at my table / one more time.
— “I just want dimsum undisturbed by wypipo”
a theory of birds, zaina alsous
zaina alsous is a prison abolitionist, a daughter of the palestinian diaspora, and a movement worker in south florida. the blurb for a theory of birds describes it as “putting ecological conservation in conversation with arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds”, and as someone who wanted to be an ornithologist as a child and now works in climate policy, it feels like she wrote this to speak to my soul.
Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside the woman a lake of funerals, disappointed male lovers, scientists, Inside the lake a volcano of whale songs, Inside the volcano a language of naming, Inside the language an algorithm for de-extinction, Inside the algorithm blued dynamite to dissolve the colony’s Sun, twinkle twinkle, I didn’t mean to fall in love with failure, its molting rapture, I didn’t mean to name myself from a necklace of silent vowels, I didn’t go looking from for the bird, I entered through the empty cage, hips first
— “Bird Prelude”
boy with thorn, rickey laurentiis
rickey laurentiis is a poet who was raised in new orleans, louisiana, to study light. this is true for a lot of poetry imo, but every piece in boy with thorn requires reading at least twice in a row, because laurentiis’s use of language is so deft and stuffed with meaning that i needed to experience it from different angles. the description for the collection tells us “in a landscape at once the brutal american south as it is the brutal mind, boy with thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence”.
Therefore, my head was kingless.
I was a head alone, moaning in a wet black field.
I was like any of those deserter slaves
whose graves are just the pikes raised for their heads, reshackled, blue
and plain as fear.
All night I whistled at a sky that mocked me,
that fluently changed its grammar as if to match desire in my eye.
My freedom is possible, it said.
— “Conditions for a Southern Gothic”
this is kind of cheating because i first read eye level when it came out in 2017, but i recently reread it so i feel like it counts! jenny xie was born in anhui province, china, and now lives in the united states. eye level travels with xie from phnom penh to corfu to hanoi to new york city, and her descriptions piercing, sensual, and bottomless.
Sunday, awake with this headache. I pull apart the evening with a fork. White clot behind the eyes.
Someone once told me, before and after is just another false binary. The warmed-over bones of January. I had no passport. Beneath the stove, two mice made a paradise out of a button of peanut butter.
Suffering operates by its own logic. Its gropics and reversals. Ample, in ways that are exquisite. And how it leaves —not unlike how it arrives, without clear notice.
— “Zuihitsu”
i also post about english-language palestinian poetry (both written in english and in translation) in my #palestinian poets series, each of which features poems you can find online!
kianamaiart
izzy806
blakekathryn
titsay
romaincrisis
stormborns
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
