#muticultural

Poetry Recommendations (2019/2020 releases) 

Little Envelope of Earth Conditions by Cori A. Winrock

3.65/5 stars on goodreads

Poems dive straight into the depths of mental illness and depression, evoking intense grief and pain. Heavy space imagery is paired with streams of consciousness, trying to come to terms with loss but feeling like you’re floating through a surreal world like an astronaut on a different planet.

The Truth About Magic by Atticus Poetry

3.99/5 stars on goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of The Dark Between Stars and Love Her Wild, Instagram sensation Atticus returns with another romantic and deeply moving collection.

The Truth About Magic builds on the pains and joys of romance explored in Love Her Wild and the New York Times bestseller, The Dark Between Stars—heartbreaks and falling in love, looking back and looking inwards—by taking a fresh, awakened journey outward. An adventure into the great unknown. It’s about finding ourselves, our purpose, and the simple joys of life. It’s about lavender fields, drinking white wine out of oak barrels on vineyards, laughing until you cry, dancing in old barns until the sun comes up, and making love on sandy beaches.

The Truth About Magic is a vibrant, transcendent journey into growth, which will leave you energized and eager to explore the wider world.

Witch by Philip Matthews

4.14/5 stars on goodreads

Poems merge queer ecopoetics with religious disposition, speaking through a pantheon of mythic figures―from Jesus to Aphrodite―to commune or contend with reality. What emerges is a cumulative awareness of being a physical, energetic body in a fractured world, attempting to heal some part of it while exploring and embracing the gray areas of identity and ambiguity.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

4.48/5 stars on goodreads

Ilya Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence?

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Homie by Danez Smith

4.5/5 stars on goodreads

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

To Drink Coffee with a Ghost by Amanda Lovelace

4.08/5 stars on goodreads

"You cannot have a funeral for your mother without also having a funeral for yourself." This book poses the ever-lingering question: What happens when someone dies before they're able to redeem themselves?

I have noticed that happening too. Like a black sidekick is JUST FINE. Especially if he is SUPER AWESOME and perfect. I’m sorry I love Diggle, but that’s what he is. But it’s still a white man lead super hero show and the various casts of multicultural sidekicks don’t change that.  But it doesn’t rock the boat.

This one? This rocks the boat. 

Lead Bisexual female? She acts as an actual bisexual, and it rocks the boat, because it comes so close to what people want for their WLW representation, but it’s, well, it’s bisexual, not lesbian. And so they feel betrayed. 

Having a mixed race Filipino lead male? It’s amazing. He’s complex and morally gray and always learning, but it disturbs people greatly that he has to suffer and is placed in a not always perfect light. On a show that is literally about delinquents surviving the apocalypse, they want their representation to be perfect and always win and always a good guy. So they feel betrayed.

We have the WHOLE Arkadia storyline, and there is precisely ONE straight white male in it, and he’s suffering from mental illness, and rather than recognizing that the whole story, especially the political one, is lead by POC characters, we say it’s “demonizing” the black man. I mean. Okay. Pike was the bad guy. And he was fighting with Kane, (a half Chilean man, not a white man) over the soul of our POC male hero. But what they see is a dark story line for their fav POC characters. So they feel betrayed.

I don’t know. I think we’ve got some dark, edgy shows, like The 100 and TWD, about apocalypse and survival, and they have a lot more diversity in them, because of the genre. And people who are looking for diversity… well they don’t always want to see the darkness. But the darkness allows the shows to present a world that is NOT like this one. 

We really do need more diversity in our representation, more shows where we get to see conventional stories with people of many races and cultures… but the more conventional a story is, the less likely they are going to represent diverse people? So we’ve got a catch 22 right?