LGBTQ+ Poets
Librarians at The Seattle Public Library selected this list of recent poetry by LGBTQ+ poets. (May 2026)
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Decompose
Decompose explores pruning our past to make room for future growth; the expanse we are offered through the crush of heartbreak, discovering family beyond our original home, finding new meaning in our own name. (Publisher description)
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Perverts
Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. . . Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel's Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause. (Publisher description)
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Reprise
A visual & lyrical declaration filled with fever & flight, Reprise, Golden’s second collection of poetry & photography, maps a personal search for safety in a US that offers none. (Publisher description)
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How to Kill A Goat & Other Monsters
One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn't want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, Hernández explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. (Publisher description)
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Availability: Available
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Song of My Softening
This stunning debut collection from Discovery Prize winner James offers a broad-ranging examination of the body and everything it can encompass for women, ranging from the traumas of youth and exposure to diet culture, to its role in the complicated dynamics between mothers and daughters, to issue of self-acceptance and sexuality as James explores issues of Black queerness. (Library Journal)
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The Natural Order of Things
In her dazzling latest, Kelly celebrates the endurance of life, love, and art, examining the porous boundaries between all living things. (Publishers Weekly)
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Death of the First Idea
Laurentiis's visionary sophomore outing showcases her incredible lyric range and incisive commentary. At its core, the collection charts a 10-year period from 2015 to 2025 chronicling the speaker's gender transition; along the way, the poems address the speaker's political awakening in an era of pandemic, violence, and struggle against pervasive anti-Blackness. (Publishers Weekly)
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Boy Maybe
Lofton’s brave poems collect and deposit metaphors that confront and ultimately transform the spaces between visibility and erasure, reflecting the complex realities of Black queer existence while forging pathways toward imagined freedoms. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
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Love Is for All of Us
This luminous and open-hearted anthology of poems from the LGBTQIA+ community proves that there is nothing more universal than love. (Publisher description)
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Savings Time
The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention. (Publisher description)
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