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Agnes

Book Recommendations: 
$16.00
SKU: 9781736552605N
Availability: Out of Stock

A love poem about a crumbling love that is also about poetry's incantatory power to empty things. "Tel Aviv" is not Tel Aviv. "Tel Aviv" is ugliness, "Tel Aviv" is making a world you can live in when you take language in your hands and warm it and soften it and push it around. A poem about a city that is mostly Brooklyn and history that is everywhere and in the heart.


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Creature By Amina Cain Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780984469383
Availability: Backordered
Published: Dorothy, a publishing project - November 1st, 2013

This book makes me feel like I'm sitting in a room filled with plants. Like, calm. Tingling with awareness. These stories are simple and elusive, filled with light and hands and houses and roads and horses, too. 


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What Did I Do Wrong? By Fanny Howe Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9780981952000
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Flood Editions - September 1st, 2009

A sometimes-forgotten novel from one of our best writers on freedom. 


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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals By Saidiya Hartman Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9780393357622
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - January 14th, 2020

Hartman has written a history that might seem imposiible to write -- an intimate history of Black women and queer people who made lives in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Punctuated with captionless photos, the book reads like equal parts novel, essay, and elegy. 


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Of Colour By Katherine Agyemaa Agard Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9781734498417
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Essay Press - June 1st, 2020

A gorgeous essay-book from multi-disciplinary Trinidadian artist Agard. She digests an impossible array of cultural imperatives and hands us something new. Equal parts refusal to surrender and celebration of that which is hybrid, messy, elusive, and multiple. Full, too, of gorgeous images -- including some of her paintings. Her writing flashes and cuts like a diamond. 


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The Beatrix Gates (Outspoken Authors) By Rachel Pollack Cover Image
$14.00
ISBN: 9781629635781
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: PM Press - February 1st, 2019

I can't say I'm particularly well-versed in science fiction. But I've been carrying these stories with me, thinking of them often in the weeks since I read them. Pollack is writing about gender and the legacy of queer community, and she's also thinking about how our hearts get stuck on ideas of who we are and want to be in the world. She writes with an eye to the long arc of the history of the spirit, and with much compassion for the muck of where we are now. Her writing has become a smooth little stone I carry in my pocket and reach for often. 


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Brown Girl, Brownstones (Contemporary Classics by Women) By Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat (Foreword by) Cover Image
By Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat (Foreword by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781558614987
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Feminist Press - July 1st, 2006

A rather unfortunately slightly forgotten classic. Marshall's characters learn how to be true to themselves; like Jacobs wrestling angels, they claim futures for themselves, even if they forever after walk with limps.  


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Overthrow: A Novel By Caleb Crain Cover Image
$17.00
Possibly out of print. Email or call to check availability and price.
ISBN: 9780525560470
Published: Penguin Books - August 25th, 2020

Maybe my favorite novel of 2020. There's something a little formal about Crain's sentences -- I want to call it poise, or a certain faith in the ability of language language to invoke the sensuous reality of the world. (And it does that... I smelled old lvoers, heard the twitter of birds, biked over bridges after midnight.) But this book is nudging a toe towards the edge of what life is now, and asking gorgeous questions about how we carry our hearts in the face of ever-expanding digital surveillance and collective crisis. Somehow it gets away with being a page-turner, a heart-squeezer, and an orchestra of ideas all at once. 


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Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through By T. Fleischmann Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566895477
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Coffee House Press - June 4th, 2019

I loved this book. 


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The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions By Larry Mitchell, Ned Asta (Illustrator) Cover Image
By Larry Mitchell, Ned Asta (Illustrator)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781643620060
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Nightboat Books - July 2nd, 2019

A tender and penetrating manifesto? A series of parables and sayings? A loving memorial to a queer community? Feels damn fresh, tho it was first published in the 70s. 


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The Death of Vivek Oji: A Novel By Akwaeke Emezi Cover Image
$27.00
Possibly out of print. Email or call to check availability and price.
ISBN: 9780525541608
Published: Riverhead Books - August 4th, 2020

What happens when love pushes up against limits? It spills over.

Made me feel lots of feelings.


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Midwinter Day By Bernadette Mayer Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780811214063
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: New Directions - May 1st, 1999

"I know nothing / But the lassitude of love // Half an hour after sunset / All the windows are frozen shut // Like psychology / I have to hammer the sides with my fists / To get them open, often I wonder / If I think the same things I thought as a child / When I didn't know the future of a form"

One of the great poems of the 20th century. 


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Zigzags By Kamala Puligandla Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781945649349
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Not a Cult - October 19th, 2020

This book jumped up and down all over my queer heart.

More! I whimpered. More!


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The Seep By Chana Porter Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781641292153
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Soho Press - December 8th, 2020

A swift shock of a book that has changed how I see our world. As punchy & fleet as it is eerie and melancholy -- sort of about where we're headed, but really about where we've always been. 


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Night Philosophy By Fanny Howe Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781916425026
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Divided Publishing - January 28th, 2020

A collection of essays and fragments. I've been comign back to this book a lot in these dark times. Howe is a poet and novelist; she has been circling back to questions of God, justice, poverty, race, poetry, and weakness in her many-decade career. Her writing is lyrical, tough, and brilliant. 


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Indelicacy: A Novel By Amina Cain Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781250785718
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Picador - February 9th, 2021

Cain is one of my favorite writers, period. This, her first novel, is spare and warm and transfixing. 


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The People's Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition By Kristen Kosmas Cover Image
$12.00
ISBN: 9780997866438
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: 53rd State Press - December 24th, 2019

A play for reading aloud in living rooms that is also a kind of a prayer, a poem, a manifesto. Kosmas is a tender and hopeful archaeologist of the surreal -- so, like, a extraordinary documentarian of everyday life.


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Felix Ever After By Kacen Callender Cover Image
$18.99
ISBN: 9780062820259
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Balzer + Bray - May 5th, 2020

I tore through this, laughed, cried, bit my nails, the whole deal. For the young person in your life learning about love. 


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We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan By Lou Sullivan, Ellis Martin (Editor), Zach Ozma (Editor) Cover Image
By Lou Sullivan, Ellis Martin (Editor), Zach Ozma (Editor)
$21.95
ISBN: 9781643620176
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Nightboat Books - September 24th, 2019

The selected diaries of trans activist and historian Lou Sullivan. Sullivan writes about love, sex, music, community, and gender in ways that felt so intimate -- he was writing his way into being. I almost couldn't bear to keep going, knowing the book would end with his death, in 1991, of AIDS. Now I miss him. Such a joyful book, somehow, though. 


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The Freezer Door (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9781635901283
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Semiotext(e) - November 24th, 2020

What does queer life look like, when it's so often haunted by queer death? A book that is both very funny and very sad, full of loops and questions. Felt kind of scarily alive to our now. 


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The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency By Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally (Translated by), Michael Favala Goldman (Translated by) Cover Image
By Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally (Translated by), Michael Favala Goldman (Translated by)
$30.00
ISBN: 9780374602390
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - January 26th, 2021

I couldn't get enough. And then it destroyed me. 

Disorientingly violent in an emotional way and somehow funny. Mordant, I guess, is the word?