Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry

Emanuel Xavier has edited an extraordinary anthology collecting work from America's hottest queer spoken word performers and slam-poets. Queers have always been in the forefront of US poetry: Whitman, Stein, Hughes, Ginsberg. But it's at this curious hinge of twenty-first century NOW that poetry itself has found its way into the ear of public consciousness, so that we are finally hearing Whitman's varied carols tambourining. Many of the poets in this anthology are not generally known outside the Slam, Performance, and Hip Hop Poetry worlds, but here they are at last, spinning on dialectics political, gentrified, aesthetic. Bullets & Butterflies features vibrant, sexy, and shocking new poetry focused on sexuality, gender, class, race, religion, and politics by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Regie Cabico, Staceyann Chin, Celena Glenn, Daphne Gottlieb, Maurice Jamal, Shane Luitjens, Marty McConnell, Travis Montez, Alix Olson, Shailja Patel, horehound stillpoint, and Emanuel Xavier.