Books like Queer poetics by Mary E. Galvin

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

Seventeen‑year‑old Sahar, an Iranian American, secretly loves her best friend Nasrin amid the dangers of coming out in Iran. When a marriage is arranged, Sahar faces a heart‑wracking decision between love and identity.

A decade‑long exploration of butch‑femme dynamics among contemporary lesbians, blending oral histories, fiction, poetry, and fantasy to rethink identity, sexuality, and cultural roles.

Author of five volumes of poetry and lover of Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok was the only openly lesbian voice in Russian poetry during the Silver Age of Russian letters. Parnok, however, was not a political activist, and she had no engagement with the feminism fashionable in young Russian intellectual circles. Yet, from a young age, she deplored all forms of male posturing and condescension and felt alienated from what she called "patriarchal virtues." Parnok's approach to her sexuality was equally forthright. Accepting lesbianism as her natural disposition, Parnok acknowledged her relationships with women, both sexual and nonsexual, to be the center of her creative existence. Diana Burgin's extensively researched life of Parnok is deliberately woven around the poet's own account, visible in her writings. Parnok's poems, translated here for the first time in English, added to a wealth of biographical material, make this book a fascinating and lyrical account of an important Russian poet.

Religion and sex, body and soul, sacred and profane: In Closet Devotions, Richard Rambuss traces the relays between these cultural formations by examining the issue of “sacred eroticism,” the literary or artistic expression of devotional feelings in erotic terms that has repeatedly occurred over the centuries. Rather than dismissing such expression as mere convention, Rambuss takes it seriously as a form of erotic discourse, one that gives voice to desires that, outside the sphere of sacred rapture, would otherwise be deemed taboo. Through startling rereadings of works ranging from the devotional verse of the metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne) to photographer Andres Serrano’s controversial “Piss Christ,” from Renaissance religious iconography to contemporary gay porn, Rambuss uncovers the highly charged erotic imagery that suffuses religious devotional art and literature. And he explores one of Christian culture’s most guarded (and literal) closets—the prayer closet itself, a privileged space where the vectors of same-sex desire can travel privately between the worshiper and his or her God. Elegantly written and theoretically astute, Closet Devotions illuminates the ways in which sacred Christian devotion is homoeroticized, a phenomenon that until now has gone unexplored in current scholarship on religion, the body, and its passions. This book will attract readers across a wide array of disciplines, including gay and lesbian studies, literary theory and criticism, Renaissance studies, and religion.

Working from classic texts of European and American writers―including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde―Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

Danny dreams of being a princess for the school parade, and with his mom’s full support he searches a thrift store for the perfect costume, discovering the joy of individuality and unconditional love.

Mina Loy: Woman and Poet represents the first substantial collection of criticism devoted to this long neglected major Modernist poet. Loy (1882-1966) made a career of friendship. Before World War I, she actively participated in the Futurist movement in Italy. During the war years she was a friend and associate of William Carlos Williams and other writers associated with New York Dada. In the 1920s, she was a vivid presence in the Paris literary scene. Her poems during these years were saluted by such critics as Ezra Pound, who linked her to Marianne Moore. But in the 1930s she gradually disappeared from sight, and she is the last major Modernist poet to be recovered.

The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage surveys nearly four hundred works across historical periods, highlighting the contributions of figures like Michelangelo, Armistead Maupin, Sappho, and Shakespeare to gay and lesbian literature.

In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it? Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women In Love.

A curated anthology of LGBTQ poetry from 1950 to the present, featuring American voices from the gay and lesbian communities.