‘Landmark’ anthology 100 Queer Poems published for Pride month
This Pride month, a new anthology featuring the work of queer poets such as Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong and Kae Tempest is “questioning and redefining what we mean by a ‘queer’ poem”.
100 Queer Poems, edited by Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, features work from 20th-century poets as well as contemporary LGBTQ+ voices. It’s a “landmark” anthology, said one of the contributing poets, Kit Fan, because there hasn’t been a collection of this kind “for probably two or three decades”. McMillan has described the book as “an update” to the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, the last major anthology of queer poems, published in 1986.
Jay Bernard, whose first poetry collection Surge was based on the New Cross fire archives and won the Ted Hughes award, said 100 Queer Poems was “coming at a critical, contradictory juncture: widespread hatred and distrust of trans people alongside huge efforts at representation and inclusion; general acceptance of cis gay and bisexual people yet rising intolerance post-Brexit; an increasingly vocal and visible intersex population, yet few legal rights or protections for them”.
They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.”
McMillan and Chan are both acclaimed
