100 Poets for the Present and Future.

The Essential Voices series intends to correct misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the broader culture. At its heart is the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. This anthology features 100 poets who illuminate the queer experience in the U.S., four generations of living writers, as varied in their subjects and styles as the nation they represent: rural, urban, young, old, academic, blue-collar, activist, domestic, cosmopolitan, local, brazen, subtle, out, and passing—including Kaveh Akbar, Rick Barot, Frank Bidart, Richard Blanco, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Marilyn Hacker, Robin Coste Lewis, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Justin Phillip Reed, Kay Ryan, Sam Sax, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others.

“I come to this anthology having languished, having felt benumbed, having come to question, at my very core, poetry’s value, its potency, as we contend with our current brand of American tyranny, our Hour of Lead. As I read Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, I experience an incremental awakening, or re-awakening. Every poem, every phrase in every poem, clicks a small switch in me that had been shut down, repairs a blown fuse, brings a wound into the light, provokes it into being, or staunches it. The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance. From the first lines of the opening poem, Frank Bidart’s ‘Queer’—Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything—an entreaty against self-deception, we find ourselves in veracity’s realm, where language reigns free. … The lines of these poems accordion, inhale, exhale, serpentine, straighten, curl. A carnival of approaches to diction, positionality, structure, song. This anthology is not representative of a sector of American poetry. It is American poetry. The party contains multitudes and hints at multitudes to come. When I reach the last lines of the final poem, torrin a. greathouse’s ‘On Using the Wo|men’s Bathroom,’ I am no longer numb.”
—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

• Reading from Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, featuring Rick Barot, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Charif Shanahan, presented by The Poets Corner (April 14, 2024)