The Year of Blue Water, Yanyi (Yale University Press)
This debut collection from poet Yanyi is a delicate, potent meditation on loneliness and connection. Immigration, queerness, transness, solitude, and community are explored as a way of understanding oneself in the world. It’s also about locating oneself in the body, writing and art as communal pursuits, and searching for and locating queerness through tarot, TV, and reading. The Year of Blue Water is a beautiful, honest constellation of prose poems that will resonate with readers of all identities.
Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States, Samantha Allen (Little, Brown and Company)
Samantha Allen is an award-winning journalist with some pretty impressive bylines. Her first book is a travelogue, a work of reporting, and even an anthology of sorts: of stories from LGBTQ people living in what the coastal elite call “flyover country.” What could have been a dry list of statistics and anecdotes is crafted into an engrossing journey full of humor, vulnerability, insightfulness, and joy. Allen’s utterly engaging voice is joined by the voices of her road brother Billy and everyone they meet along the way. She does an excellent job of blending interviews and research with her personal experience to paint an eye-opening picture of what it’s really like to be queer in red states. She makes a compelling case for the idea that America is incredibly queer. What results is a beautiful tapestry of, well, the real queer America.
Soft Science, Franny Choi (Alice James Books)
One of the best things about so many of the writers who are working today is that they’ve inadvertently created a Weird Gay Aunts club on Twitter. Franny Choi is an integral part of our collective Gay Aunts, alongside Carmen Maria Machado, T Kira Madden, Melissa Febos, Kristen Arnett, Danez Smith, Mira Jacob, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Alexander Chee, among others. (Click through to create a wonderful Weird Gay Aunt party in your tabs. You’re welcome.) Choi’s latest full-length poetry collection, Soft Science, walks that blurry line between technology and humanity, organic and inorganic, futuristic tech and literal dirt. Themes of bodily autonomy (or lack thereof), chaos and order, fear and resilience, and outsiderness around gender and race are deftly conveyed in punchy yet operatic lines. It’s definitely atmospheric, and will leave you wondering at, or about, the world — and what it means to be human.