Happy Pride Month! 🌈 We’re proud to host a prismatic collection of titles and writers that unapologetically amplify the Queer experience—so if you’re still trying to find or foster your Pride, look no further than this list of vividly penned publications from LGBTQIA+ authors that employ poetry, prose, and personal histories to weave a rich tapestry of Queer life and love with rainbow-coloured thread.
Sincerely, the Casemate UK Team | 7 min read
Poetry
Feeding the Ghosts
Rahul Mehta
HB · PB | 9781526752871 · 9780813198804 | £40.00 · £20.00 | Find out more
Find the beauty. In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty in everyday simplicities. The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta’s South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm.
The Wild Hunt Divinations
Trevor Ketner
HB · PB | 9780819500380 · 9780819500397 | £33.50 · £12.50 | Find out more
The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from a National Poetry Series winner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. The sonnets come together to form a grimoire that casts a trancelike and intense spell on the reader.
Prelude
Brynne Rebele Henry
PB | 9780822966883 | £13.00 | Find out more
Prelude explores the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood and adolescence of Saint Catherine of Siena. Speaking through a poetic persona of Catherine of Siena, Prelude addresses the historical erasure of gay women’s lives, juxtaposing details from her girlhood with the terrain of the lesbian body as it relates to desire and violence.
The Book of Daniel
Aaron Smith
PB | 9780822965961 | £14.00 | Find out more
Part pop-thriller, part queer rage, and part mourning,The Book of Daniel depicts not only the complications of representation in the age of social media but a critique of identity. Taking on subjects as diverse as the literary canon, his mother’s incurable cancer diagnosis, gay bashing, celebrity gossip, bigotry, violence on TV, and Alexander McQueen’s suicide, Smith proves that the confessional lyric is not dead.
Gumbo Ya Ya
Aurielle Marie
PB | 9780822966661 | £14.00 | Find out more
Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Gumbo Ya Ya is a cauldron of multifaceted poems confronting race, binaries, and violence, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. Part ancestral and familial archival, part ethnography of Black femme resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogues the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with cultural commentary and personal narrative.
Gay Poems for Red States
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
HB · PB | 9780813198118 · 9780813198125 | £27.00 · £18.00 | Find out more
In Gay Poems for Red States, Carver counters the injustice of a persistent anti-LGBTQ+ movement by asserting that a life full of beauty and pride is possible for everyone. More than a collection of poetry, Carver’s earnest and heartfelt verses are for those wishing to discover and understand the vastness of Appalachia, and for the LGBTQ+ Appalachians who long for a future—for a home—in an often unwelcoming place.
Stop Lying
Aaron Smith
PB | 9780822967040 | £15.00 | Find out more
Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of Smith’s mother and how the poet, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. This is the story of a poet pushing through present-day grief and the shame of the past to find the buried truths, the ones that are hardest to tell.
Her Birth and Later Years
Irena Klepfisz
HB · PB | 9780819500168 · 9780819501080 | £20.50 · £16.95 | Find out more
Winner of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. For fifty years, Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. This book is the first complete collection of her work.
The Selected Shepherd
Reginald Shepherd
HB | 9780822948216 | £24.00 | Find out more
Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. These poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet.
Fiction
Belle Nash and the Bath Soufflé
William Keeling
PB | 9781915023025 | £9.99 | Find out more
When a soufflé fails to rise, friends try to find out why and uncover a web of corruption that spreads throughout Bath’s legal system. Set in the early 1830s, this comic gay historical novel exposes the bigotry of the times but also introduces a new literary and moral hero—Belle Nash, city councillor and bachelor. About time!
Belle Nash and the Bath Circus
William Keeling
PB | 9781915023117 | £12.95 | Find out more
At the end of his last adventure, Belle Nash was banished for four years to the island of Grenada. It is now 1835, and Belle has returned to Bath for more shenanigans and circus acts. As ever, William Keeling’s whimsical tale brings Belle, his gay hero, into a situation where comedy does not obscure stark moral issues to do with prejudice and bigotry that are as alive today as they were in Regency times.
Sweet Tooth and Other Stories
Serkan Görkemli
HB · PB | 9781985900196 · 9781985900202 | £45.00 · £23.00 | Find out more
Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters searching for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place against the backdrop of Turkey’s transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations, and the emergence of LGBTQ+ identities.
Non-Fiction
What Price Hollywood?
Elyce Rae Helford
HB · PB | 9780813179292 · 9780813197029 | £27.00 · £27.00 | Find out more
What Price Hollywood? considers a once-in-a-generation director and his continuous exploration of gender and sexuality on-screen. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical lenses, Elyce Rae Helford examines how Cukor’s award-winning films—titles including My Fair Lady and The Philadelphia Story—as well as his lesser-known films engage Hollywood masculinity and gender performativity through camp, drag, and mixed genres.
No Son of Mine
Jonathan Corcoran
HB | 9780813198514 | £27.00 | Find out more
Jonathan Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother after coming out through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.
Deviant Hollers
Edited by Rebecca Scott & Zane McNeill
HB · PB | 9780813199306 · 9780813199337 | £54.00 · £27.00 | Find out more
Deviant Hollers uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States’ exploitation of the land, giving renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future and offering new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.
Writing & Desire
Elyce Rae Helford
HB | 9780822947776 | £48.50 £38.80 | Find out more
Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. Jonathan Alexander studies a range of queer and trans writers and artists who center desire in their practice and argues that conceptualizing writing as desire allows us to reexperience both writing and our world as saturated with our dreams and wishes for change.
Tar Hollow Trans
Stacy Jane Grover
HB | 9780813197555 | £20.00 | Find out more
In Tar Hollow Trans, Stacy Jane Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. Her essays investigate the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.
Pagan Babies
John Denny Ashley, Robert Morgan & the Pagan Babies
HB | 9798218186012 | £59.00 | Find out more
The conceptual lovechild of photographer John Denny Ashley and artist Robert Morgan, Pagan Babies has at long last emerged as a vibrant witness to a particular moment in American history, a time when sexual revolution and gay liberation manifested even in small Southern towns like Lexington, Kentucky.
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