Best Gay Poetry 2008

by Lawrence Schimel (Editor)

Best Gay Poetry is a new annual series collecting the best gay poems of the year before. It offers both poetry aficionados and casual gay readers an easy way to keep abreast of the field and find poems that speak to their experience.

Editor Lawrence Schimel has brought together a diverse array of poems and voices, not merely in their poetic style and form, but also in how gay subjects and themes are addressed. Drawing on poems published in journals, anthologies, and single-author collections, Best Gay Poetry 2008 offers the cream of the crop of what was published in 2007, gathered together in one handy volume. Featuring work from 50 gay poets, readers will find herein a mix of established poets and exciting new voices, including Carl Phillips, Rane Arroyo, David Bergman, Timothy Liu, Brad Gooch, Reginald Shepard, Jeff Mann, Steve Fellner, Jee Leong Koh, Steven Cordova, Jericho Brown, and many others.

Best Gay Poetry 2008 also includes an annotated bibliographic round-up of relevant gay-interest poetry books published the year before, making it an invaluable research tool for both institutions and individuals.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

I'm a full-time author, anthologist, and translator (Spanish->English) living in Madrid, Spain.

Writing in both Spanish and English, I've published over 90 books in a wide range of genres, including poetry (DESAYUNO EN LA CAMA and FAIRY TALES FOR WRITERS), children's books (LA AVENTURA DE CECILIA Y EL DRAGÓN, COSAS QUE PUEDO HACER YO SOLO, LITTLE PIRATE GOES TO SCHOOL, etc.), short stories (TWO BOYS IN LOVE, HIS TONGUE, THE DRAG QUEEN OF ELFLAND), graphic novels (VACATION IN IBIZA), and many anthologies (STREETS OF BLOOD: VAMPIRE STORIES FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH, SWITCH HITTERS: LESBIANS WRITE GAY MALE EROTICA AND GAY MEN WRITE LESBIAN EROTICA, KOSHER MEAT, FOUND TRIBE: JEWISH COMING OUT STORIES, CAMELOT FANTASTIC, etc.)

I've twice won a Lambda Literary Award, for FIRST PERSON QUEER and PoMoSEXUALS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

My picture book ¿LEES UN LIBRO CONMIGO? was selected by the International Board of Books for Young People for Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities 2007 and my picture book NO HAY NADA COMO EL ORIGINAL was selected by the International Youth Library in Munich for the White Ravens 2005.

My poem "How to Make a Human" won the Rhysling Award for Best Science Fiction Poem.

I am also the publisher of A Midsummer Night's Press, a small poetry publisher, which has published THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR OTHER LIFE by Achy Obejas, THE GOOD-NEIGHBOR POLICY: A DOUBLE CROSS IN DOUBLE DACTLYS by Charles Ardai, BANALITIES by Brane Mozetic, translated by Elizabeti Zargi, and FORTUNE'S LOVER: A BOOK OF TAROT POEMS by Rachel Pollack, as well as the annual series BEST GAY POETRY and BEST LESBIAN POETRY.

Reviews

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 5 out of 5]

GAY POETRY

I thoroughly enjoyed Best Gay Poetry 2008, the first and only published volume in a projected annual series. In his introduction to the collection, Lawrence Schimel, the editor, writes that he published the book himself through A Midsummer Night’s Press, his “one-man press,” with co-publishing duties handled by Lethe Press. Schimel took on an absolutely wonderful—and extremely ambitious—project. It would be fantastic if he had been able to continue publishing annual volumes of the best gay poetry of the year. These collections would be books for the ages. We would be looking forward to Best Gay Poetry 2023 right now.

Schimel scoured journals and collections and selected 50 poems by 50 gay poets that were published in 2007. The collection is arranged alphabetically by author’s surname. To use a cliché, this collection is an embarrassment of riches. I wanted more. Well-known names appear in Best Gay Poetry 2008, such as Emmanuel Xavier, Brad Gooch, and Reginald Harris, as well as unfamiliar poets, at least to me, such as C. Dale Young, Richard Johns, and Billeh Nickerson. As Schimel indicates in his introduction, he hoped “to highlight the best of gay poetries, in all its poetic diversity as well as with regard to the gay subjects and themes addressed.”

I found myself rereading various poems before going on to the next poet. So many of the poems in this collection are wondrously quotable. For example, Raymond Luczak, “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man”:
Let your hands be your passport,
for he will then stamp it with approval.
A deaf man is always a foreign country.
He remains forever a language to learn.

Or D. Antwan Stewart, “Elegy”:
the sun ravaging you with light,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
those birds lost somewhere in your body’s cast shadow.

And Reginald Harris, “Trailer Park Self-Portrait”: “but you . . . / a black man . . . you in the dark / he whispers you / then wouldn’t understand / Hmm . . . I don’t even want to try // I cannot see myself in his blue eyes”

One more: Richard Johns, “Mixed Connections”: “And / then you were pulling / away, and I couldn’t keep pace with / the train. Remember?”

Oh, hell, I also love these lines from “Sweat Equity” by Peter Pereira:
Like when we wrote our names
onto the closet wall of the first apartment
we shared, before repaneling it with cedar—
we’re still there, beneath the surface, built in.

There’s a lot more in Best Gay Poetry 2008 than the above quoted lines.

If Lawrence Schimel had been able to continue with this massively overwhelming publishing project, every one of the annual volumes would be a collector’s item. I guess it’s a total fantasy to hope that someone at some time would pick up where Schimel left off. As well as detailed author bios, Schimel includes at the end of the book a bibliography of gay-interest poetry titles from 2007. With this kind of additional documentation, the Best Gay Poetry series would be invaluable research sources.

I checked to see if Best Gay Poetry 2008 was available to borrow and read online from the Internet Archive’s Open Library. Unfortunately, it isn’t. So, if you find yourself in a used bookstore and come across a copy of Best Gay Poetry 2008, grab it, take it to the register, then bring it home with you and treasure it.

[Libby Gerdes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A complication of gay love, pain and everything in between. Despite being in alphabetical order, there was a sensical arc and a 20-page poem is right in the middle (which was not my favorite but was engaging like most of the others).

[Charlie]

Probably the best compendium of multi-author poetry I've ever read.