April is National Poetry Month. There are lots of poetry books in the Trans Literature Database. Whether you are new to poetry or a long-time fan, here are a few titles for your consideration.
Anthologies
We want it all : An anthology of radical trans poetics
Edited by Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel.
Nightboat Books (2020). isbn: 9781643620336
An experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.
Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
Edited by TC Tolbert & Trace Peterson.
Nighboat Books (2013). isbn: 9781937658106
This anthology gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. Along with poetry by each trans writer, the book includes “poetics statements”–reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism. Poets include Samuel Ace, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Micha Cardenas, kari edwards, Duriel Harris, Joy Ladin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, Trish Salah, Max Wolf Valerio, John Wieners, Kit Yan, and more.
Subject to change : trans poetry & conversation
Edited by H Melt.
Sibling Rivalry Press (2017). isbn: 9781943977437
This anthology celebrates the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry and interviews, this collection is a testament to the power of trans poets speaking to one another—about family, race, class, disability, religion, and the body. This anthology includes a range of trans experiences and poetics, expanding the possibilities of what it means to be both trans and a writer in the twenty-first century.
Find more anthologies with the TLDB
Trans Masc Poets
An Optimism : poems
by Cameron Awkward-Rich.
Persea Books (2025). isbn: 9780892556212
“An Optimism is an incisive, lyrical work propelled by the unfixed possibilities of We, vexing syntax to reveal vital durations of commitment and togetherness. Lines are channels—to access or to be accessed by. Lines are horizons. To Pauli Murray, Cameron Awkward-Rich writes: ‘As far I know there is no tense, not in English, to describe the shape of time you help me see, the was/will-be.’ An utterance I say back to Awkward-Rich about his exacting, capacious work. An Optimism is an astonishment of theory, analysis, and Black trans/ feminist/queer imagination.” – Aracelis Girmay
Consider the Rooster
by Oliver Baez Bendorf.
Nightboat Books (2024). isbn: 9781643622385
“Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.”
Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya / La canción de Cenex, hijo natural de la Ínsula Alarabíyya
by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera.
Graywolf Press (2025). isbn: 9781644453513
“Algarabía is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.”
“Algarabía es una epopeya que sigue el viaje de Cenex, un ser trans que narra su vida retrospectivamente mientras navega por las historias contadas en su nombre.”
Find more trans masc poets with the TLDB
Trans Femme Poets
a body more tolerable
by jaye simpson.
Arsenal Pulp Press (2025). isbn: 9781551529677
“Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view. a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.”
Local Woman
by Jzl Jmz
Nightboat Books (2025). isbn: 9781643622736
“Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.”
Perverts
by Kay Gabriel.
Nightboat Books (2025). isbn: 9781643622941
“Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.”
Find more trans femme poets with the TLDB
More Sure: poems and interruptions
by A. Light Zachary.
Arsenal Pulp Press (2023). isbn: 9781551529172
“A book of poems and interruptions, recording instances of love, self-realization, and recovery in non-binary, queer, and autistic lives. In their stunning debut collection, A. Light Zachary draws power from a vision of life – especially queer and neurodivergent life – as a journey of continuous self-realization. These poems record the experience of locating oneself over and over again, within gender, language, family, labour, sexuality, fear, and love.”
Togetherness
by Wo Chan.
Nightboat Books (2022). isbn: 9781643621449
“A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence. Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag–at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.”
There Are Trans People Here
by H. Melt.
Haymarket Books (2021). isbn: 9781642595727
“There are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.”
Find more nonbinary poets with the TLDB
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