Loving on Glitter Tongue anthology

I can’t get enough of glitter tongue. If I could lick these poems, I would. I want to keep this short so you can spend more time reading them than reading me, but I do so want to talk about this collection of poems. This online anthology of queer love poems, launched on Tuesday for (anti-)Valentine’s Day, is doing queer poetics right:

We have an interruption of discourses of power (you know, a leveling of the playing field, or whatever), with emerging writers (Hello, StS contributor July Westhale!) sharing space with established writers (I can’t stop reading Ellen Bass’s “God and the G-spot.” I keep sending it to friends like it’s a valentine). We have a variety of voices using different varieties of language—we get to enjoy the lush alongside the frank. We have speakers and poets from different experiences, and we have different definitions of queer driving the experiences of the poems. We have trans* voices speaking to those of us queer folks who are trans*, and we have the careful language that the anthology comes from “queer and trans poets,” for those of us who are trans* and don’t identify as queer.

So to Speak is especially excited that Ching-In Chen (contributor to our previous issue, 20.2) is part of the writing-collective-turned-editorial-team that has put together and contributed to this delightful anthology and, again, that our most recent issue’s July Westhale has contributed a poem.

The anthology features poems coming (this is a very appropriate word choice) from queer experience, poems written to queer experience, and, most of all, poems that are richly engaged in experience and readability. I refuse to wash them out to a universal, but I will say that these poems deserve a diverse readership. So, go read the poems, and then send them to your friends. I don’t think they’ll mind a belated valentine.