Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology
About the Book
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world. To see the full list of contributing poets, please see the table of contents here.
“When heteronormativity prescribes a binary to everything it touches—something is either natural or unnatural—what a salve to reclaim and celebrate nature in its sprawling wonder and unfettered queerness. This is an invitation to readers who’ve long felt excluded from representations of the natural and pastoral. No longer stripped of its wildness and subtext, the nature reflected in these poems is the breadth of human experience: its complexities and aches, its trauma and desires, its richness and possibilities. Queer Nature understands nature resists constraint and simplification. It is boundless and borderless. It belongs to everyone.”
—Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire
“Imagine my delight and pride in being a part of this anthology! Imagine your pleasure as you immerse yourself in this beauty of queerness! This is a must-have book for all.”
—Chrystos, author of Fire Power, In Her I Am, and Not Vanishing
“This anthology makes visible the astonishing range and impact of queer poets. Page after page shimmers with emotional and intellectual pleasures—these poems will make you think, weep, sing, and sigh with relief. Michael Walsh’s remarkable curation reminds us what’s natural has always been queer and what’s queer is always natural.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
About the Book
2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Gay Poetry
Michael Walsh’s poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into a disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex’s other sons, the unsettling presence of the child’s father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.
“These permutations of the human capacity for terror, especially regarding mental illness, are purely compelling. The poems build one on the other, compounding what is an always unsettling movement forward. This is hard, plain content, and as readers, we are spared little. If this sounds uninviting, that is not so—these poems find a place to stand through it all, and this redemptive footing is the key to survival in so many circumstances. These poems find courage where there is none to be found, and are, in that sense, full of pure human spirit.”
—Alberto Ríos, author of A Small Story about the Sky
“It’s a rare poet who can make such powerful poetry from pain, such lyrical beauty out of unthinkable suffering as Walsh has done in his latest collection, Creep Love. Clearly, a master of the confessional poem, Walsh is an engaging poet whose story of a rural past, an abusive stepfather, a Midwestern farm life is at once haunting, terrifying, and beautifully told.”
—Nin Andrews, author of Miss August
“This book is a sacrament: the broken body and the blood. This dark gospel of betrayal hits hard, leaving marks, sparing no one.”
—Timothy Liu, author of Don’t Go Back to Sleep
The Dirt Riddles
About the Book
Winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize
This powerful first collection and winner of the inaugural Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize is literally rooted in the earth and in the world of animal husbandry. You can taste these poems about life on a family dairy farm in your mouth. In these lyrical poems we meet a closeted young man, his parents, their herd, and the other flora, fauna, and objects that populate his surreal garden.
“What a way to initiate the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, a series honoring one of our best American poets, by introducing an important new talent, Michael Walsh, a poet who concentrates on meaningful particulars and who doesn’t try to dazzle us with poetic footwork. These are poems about work and farm life, the minutes and days and years, the harsh numbers mounting—about strong, feeling people as they sense their way of life slipping away, even as they struggle to maintain themselves and find their own identity. Walsh has a fine eye, authority with our precious words, and a deft hand with the music of our language.”
—Paul Zimmer, author of Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems
“Walsh’s poems in this beautiful book present us with particularized erotics of nature, in which the speaker feels an electricity running through all living things. The poems celebrate that force in a hushed, almost breathless voice that nevertheless is as tough as the objects that it locates and names. Who remembers nature without romantic distortion? Well, Walsh does, on this farm, with these people and animals, and their work, and their loves, in abundance.”
—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
“Walsh has trained his keen eye on the hardscrabble family farm of the Midwest to give us a powerful American elegy. . . . These fierce lyrics burn away the fat of nostalgia and evoke a lost way of life that was beloved but also bruising. The poems form an enthralling plot, moving deftly from a boyhood on the farm to the urban life of adulthood with its city gardens, love, passion, and memory. The result is a book that establishes both a world and a voice. A magnificent debut.”
—Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter