As the gay mainstream prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value, writes Matt Bernstein Sycamore, aka Mattilda, editor of That's Revolting! . This timely collection of essays by writers such as Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Charlie Anders, Benjamin Shepard, and others shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commoditized, and hyper objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," "Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay," and "Queer An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?"

Steven Leyva’s second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man’s lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology. In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come.” For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film. This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask “What is the opposite of cruelty?” The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man’s hand touching another man’s face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, "not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left / when the world’s terrors retreat.”

Steven Leyva’s second collection of poetry renders beauty through a Black man’s lens in a post-pandemic world populated with superheroes and characters from ancient mythology. In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come.” For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film. This book does not look away from life's hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask “What is the opposite of cruelty?” The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man’s hand touching another man’s face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, "not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left / when the world’s terrors retreat.”

Book by Pratt, Minnie Bruce

Book by Pratt, Minnie Bruce

Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom.    Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.   YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.  

The 2025 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Garden City by Sara Elkamel. Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books, 2021). She lives in Cairo. “Garden City is a lapidary, fecund investigation of the lives of women: mothers and kittens, sisters and angels—as well as female prisoners of the state, who coexist in a temporally synesthetic lockdown between pharaonic and contemporary Egypt,” writes Ken Chen. The book's dynamic figures and the poet's dreamlike descriptions of them are rife with struggle, and rich with life.