In Among the Leaves, 18 queer male poets share stories what it means to live in the Midwest. We learn what it's like for them to play football and come up short. We feel their lingering effects of bullying. We experience the undeniable power of seasons affecting their moods as they ache for a meaningful connection. We learn what it means to celebrate in spite of the odds against them. But more than anything, we discover anew through their poems the redemptive power of love and renewal among the leaves growing and falling.

Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience

Biographies & Memoirs

Squares & Rebels

When We Become Weavers brings together a multitude of voices exploring the many dimensions of the Midwest queer female experience: a land of moderation and extremes, lakes and thunderstorms, tall grass prairie and dance clubs, racism and transphobia, assault and female erotic power. In this volume, 17 poets, familiar and new, share stories you won't soon forget.

When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwestern Experience

What does it mean to be gay and Gaelic in today's world? Twelve writers from both sides of the Big Pond-both Irish and of Irish descent-aim to find out through a mix of fiction, poetry, play excerpts, and memoir. Love, politics, family, and Catholicism are the powerful forces at play here, all tendered with the unmistakable and complex feelings one associates with their home country. Their words sing of pain and pride, and always with an ear for storytelling. You will not forget their voices long after the neighborhood pub has closed.

Queer & Celtic: On the Irish Lgbt Experience (English and Irish Edition)

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

With its twelve sharply observed stories filled with memorable characters and dialogue imbued with the pop music of the day, Gregg Shapiro reflects on what it meant to grow up gay in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s. Relationships-family, boyfriends, and otherwise-are explored in stories such as "Lunch with a Porn Star," "Marilyn, My Mother, Myself," and "Your Father's Car." Only a gay Chicago native with a keen eye could give us such an insider's view of the Windy City from a more innocent time not too long ago.

Lincoln Avenue: Chicago Stories

Shapiro, Gregg

Literary

Featuring fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics by 48 writers from around the world, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn't just a buzzword. It's a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths. Here is a gathering of people with the transformative-and political-power of love that transcends gender and ability. Ignorance is the biggest barrier. "An anthology often creates a community. In this respect, QDA is truly groundbreaking because it brings two wonderful communities together. There is not a single style, genre, or opinion in the book, but an orchestra of voices. Their seminal works mirror-and do not mirror-each other. Taken together, they light a brilliant path of honesty." -Jennifer Bartlett, co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

Qda: A Queer Disability Anthology

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

In these immaculately crafted stories inspired by the 1980s, Philip Dean Walker spotlights a cast of celebrities and historical figures in situations unsettling as Day-Glo and poignant as roses while the specter of AIDS looms. "This highly original meditation on the '80s is like nothing else you've read. Dead celebrities are brought back to life in the oddest places: Jackie O in a New York sex club, Princess Di in a London drag bar, Rock Hudson at the White House. Plus Sylvester, Halston and Liza, Keith Haring, Madonna, and, best of all, an anonymous narrator who notices that only good-looking guys in New York are getting the new gay cancer. Odd conjunctions, great wit, and the shadow of AIDS make these stories deceptively light and strangely disturbing." --Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance "In his debut collection At Danceteria and Other Stories, Philip Dean Walker writes with a kind of savage nostalgia, one that knows the past was not prettier or glitzier or more fabulous--only more terrifying. Set in the early 1980s, when the word 'queer' was still an insult and when doctors and nurses invented their own names for the mysterious disease killing beautiful young men, At Danceteria and Other Stories brutally exposes how what we don't know about ourselves can kill us. Walker's writing is vivid, electric and devastating." --Stephanie Grant, author of The Passion of Alice "These stories--so funny and inventive, so merciless, smart, and affecting--are like no others I know, populated with American celebutantes, like Liza Minnelli, Jackie Kennedy, and Little Edie Beale, and punctuated by an abiding American loneliness that has the power to break one's heart. Walker's stories are fully, fully alive." --Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows "At a time when many young gay writers are forgetting their queer lineage, Philip Dean Walker comes along and schools us with his debut short story collection. Here is Halston, Liza, and Warhol at Studio 54; here is a drag queen who rivals Josephine Baker's star appeal; and here is, in Walker's words, the boy who lived next to the boys next door, dead during the early plague years, but resurrected through Walker's alluring prose, prose that renders the past our present. These stories are clever and do not apologize for their cleverness, like Rock Hudson, who explains here, 'Handsome men know they're handsome. There was no reason to be coy or overly modest about it--that kind of thing just reeked of phoniness to him.' Phony, these stories are not. From the Castro to Grey Gardens, I travelled gleefully alongside Walker in At Danceteria and Other Stories, and am only disappointed the journey had to end." --D. Gilson, author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays "Reading Philip Dean Walker is like being swept into the defiantly glittering rooms of tragedy-darkened souls. Walker's At Danceteria and Other Stories testifies to the tart-tongued power of language to resurrect and witness, in tales that are screamingly funny and hauntingly sad. His men and women radiate an alluring self-awareness and fallibility that touches our deepest places." --Elise Levine, author of Driving Men Mad

At Danceteria and Other Stories

Walker, Philip Dean

With equal parts wit and empathy, lived experience and cultural criticism, Kelly Davio's It's Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability explores what it means to live with an illness in our contemporary culture, whether at home or abroad.
"When the body attacks itself, the crisis is not just of bones and blood, but of beauty and boundaries. 'Strange men have had their hands on me for days, ' Kelly Davio observes during a plasma treatment. Her skillful portrait of myasthenia gravis does not exist in a vacuum. It's Just Nerves is in keen dialogue with the world around us--critiquing modern health care, pub seating etiquette, alarming election outcomes, smarmy meditation culture, and caricatures of illness in ads and on screen. 'Oxygen is delicious, ' Davio reminds us, before the fire breaks out. A brisk, funny, and at times startlingly poetic memoir." --Sandra Beasley, author of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life
"Kelly Davio's It's Just Nerves feels like the book I've been waiting for all my life. If you want to know what it feels like to be a person with a disability in the 21st century, read this book. From mindfulness to yoga pants, Davio skewers ableist fabrications and brings us to a vital, ebullient, and sometimes terrifying reckoning with our real and shared human experience. She is a very funny writer and also a fearless one. Once I started reading these essays, I couldn't put them down; they resounded through me like poetry or truth." --Sheila Black, author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq
"Kelly Davio's got so much incredible stuff brewing together on every page of these nimble, shapeshifting essays: meditations on the politics of illness, the body in crisis, the spirit in bloom, David Bowie--all of it filtered, carefully, through the lithe sensibility of a poet. The results are equal parts witty and wise, heartrending and rapturous. Man, I loved this book." --Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe
Kelly Davio is the author of Burn This House. She lives and writes in New Jersey.

It's Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Davio, Kelly

Diseases & Physical Ailments

London was a very different place in the early 1980s. Ian Young regales us with colorful stories about Finsbury Park, a neighborhood and its fascinating habitués long gone--stamp collectors, anarchist poets, and gay skinheads--resisting the dark forces of a Thatcherite government. Getting lost is the best way to learn about Finsbury Park."In London Skin & Bones, a corner of the past comes alive, regenerates flesh and muscle, and throws on a coat (with a freshly-rolled joint tucked in its pocket) to wander a neighborhood populated by an unlikely, diverse tribe of friends who weave in and out of stories with familiarity so warm you'll wonder if these tales came from your own memory--or your own dreams. Ian Young knows you can fall in love with a city with the same enthusiasm and eroticism you fall for a person, and deep in blue-collar London of the 1980s, with its eclectic shops and sporadic downpours, its veterans and refugees of other countries' wars, its confident sexuality rising like a collective adolescence, an easy mingling occurs. Reading these stories, you're not a stranger in a strange land. You're a traveler welcome to a cup of something warm or something strong, someone's hand tapping lightly on your shoulder with an invitation to join the next spectacular adventure right around the corner." --Bryan Borland, author of DIG"Like Isherwood's 'I Am a Camera' Berlin Stories, Young's interlocking London stories of Lad Culture, told by a book-loving ex-pat photographer, are droll mugshots of boxers, shop boys, immigrant gangsters, stoned philatelists, and their older tor/mentors who survived the 1940s Blitz easier than 1980s Thatcherism. A marvelous book! Quoting Noel Coward, 'I couldn't have liked it more!'" --Jack Fritscher, PhD, author of Mapplethorpe"Ian Young gives us a wonderful sense of a particular time and place in 1980s London, but he does so much more than simply that. His fascinating cast of skinheads, scoundrels (charming ones at that), collectors, and eccentrics turns the cliché of the 'city as character' on its head, reminding us of a neglected truth: that a city is its people, that the flow of beautiful, flawed and fascinating people is what gives a town, and a life, its texture and vitality. Even better, he shows us this in interwoven vignettes that are as unfailingly delightful as they are edifying." --Peter Dubé, author of The City's Gates"In 1980, Ian Young came to live in an area of north London where we so-called Londoners never thought of setting foot. We made a big mistake! Resident there was a colony of more colorful figures than could ever be imagined--refugees, skinheads and shopkeepers, decent, kindly, humorous, perhaps not always absolutely honest folk (Russell the landlord ran the Blind Guide Dogs charity racket), enduring a repressive Tory government but determined to live life to the full. Young is not the first London chronicler since Dickens to use the short-story format, but the time has come to put the earlier books up for a while and settle down with London Skin & Bones. All hail Ian Young, the Boz of Finsbury Park!" --Timothy d'Arch Smith, author of The Frankaus"Move over Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. Finsbury Park has arrived!" --Trebor Healey, author of A Horse Named Sorrow

London Skin and Bones: The Finsbury Park Stories

Young Dr, Ian

Short Stories & Anthologies

Bobby Quinn has been haunted by two enigmatic people for most of his adult life: Ben Morrissey, a sexy Don Juan who becomes a famous photographer in late 1990s Manhattan, and Monika Lilac, a beautiful cinephile femme fatale who is consumed by her love for silent-era films. This is a story about romantic obsession and cinematic obsessiveness, and a portrait of young people falling in love and trying to make their mark before the party is over.
"That Was Something--a profound, delicate, emotionally involving novel--gripped my attention by accurately evoking certain lost moments in queer urban life. I admire the book's taut structure and tenderly direct diction: The Great Gatsby on poppers. In high-contrast, horny chiaroscuro, without clutter, Callahan documents the chemical reaction that occurs when gayness and bi-curiosity greet each other in the dark room." --Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin
"Known for his superb books about the art of acting, Dan Callahan brings all his piercing insight to the tale of Robert, who yearns for photographer Ben Morrissey, who in turn has a yen for Monika Lilac--sometime blogger, silent-film devotee, and mistress of self-dramatization. That Was Something itself takes on the wild comedy and vivid emotions of a silent movie, as the characters swirl through the bars and parties and screening rooms of Manhattan 20 years ago, a world of artists and others obsessed with 'the important things: Love, Death, Love again.'" --Farran Smith Nehme, author of Missing Reels
Dan Callahan is the author of three books. This is his first novel.

That Was Something

Callahan, Dan

Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass, was born in 1819. The Stonewall riots happened 150 years later. On the bicentennial of Whitman's birth and the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, over 80 poets pay homage to not only Walt Whitman, but also to queer poets and queer poetry and the vast and various events, revolutions public and private, that have shaken our world since 1819: who we are, where we are, where we have have been, and where we might be going in the 21st century. "This wide and impressive range of poetry echoing the spirit of Walt Whitman and his literary forebears demonstrates the essential embrace of community that we've always needed to feel whole with ourselves and among others, especially now during these tumultuous times. Celebrating what had to be largely hidden from view during Whitman's day, the living queer male poets who grace the pages trumpet a glorious and unforgettable spectacle of passion and compassion." --Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet

Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman

Poetry

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Books by Squares & Rebels