20 Books to Read for Pride
Here are some of our favorite books by LGBTQIA+ identifying Asian American writers for you to read! Each book links to bookshop.org, where you can purchase a book and also support local independent bookstores.
Curated by Fia Zhang Swanson
Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem and spoken word, he answers long standing questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress—an inquisition is dangerous, after all. Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.
: once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio
cheena marie lo writes: “In : once teeth bones coral :, Kimberly Alidio pulls language apart and what remains is as striking as it is spare. The form here is a container, haunting in its spaciousness, and gestures towards landscapes, borders, trauma, tenderness, home. Alidio’s poems reveal the ‘luminous familiar,’ traces of the interior that make visible the simultaneity of histories and futures, the possibilities inherent in queer connection, kinship, and refusal. These fragments are precise and expansive, and will resonate for a very long time.”
If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar
If They Come for Us is an imaginative, soulful debut poetry collection that captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.”
Crossfire – A Litany for Survival by Staceyann Chin
Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”
Soft Science explores queer Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experiences—birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews—Jan-Henry Gray reveals the narrative limits of legal documentation while simultaneously embracing the intersections of identity, desire, heritage, love, and a new imagining of freedom.
Connor & Seal by Jee Leong Koh
Inspired by Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Connor & Seal is a queering of poetic lineage. These poems innovate the public and private axes of gay love in a tumescent future. We meet Connor, a native Nebraskan and fledgling grant writer, and Seal, a financial analyst from Kingston, Jamaica, as they flummox the space between desire and demise, “the sun again a big orange pill / stuck in the blue throat of the sky.” Connor & Seal serves as almanac to a time not far off, of techno-queer bots, state-sponsored violence, and individual resistance. Each poem in Connor & Seal becomes a cipher of the labor of tomorrow’s construction: “a bench where two old faggots had to stop,” an emblem of a future history, “as quiet as the siren / is alarming.”
The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart by R. Zamora Linmark
This is a tender, quirky story of one seventeen-year-old boy’s journey through first love and first heartbreak, guided by his personal hero, Oscar Wilde. Words have always been more than enough for Ken Z, but when he meets Ran at the mall food court, everything changes. Beautiful, mysterious Ran opens the door to a number of firsts for Ken: first kiss, first love. But as quickly as he enters Ken’s life, Ran disappears, and Ken Z is left wondering: Why love at all, if this is where it leads?
Timothy Liu explores how the necessities of life and art dovetail to open up a vital path forward at midlife. Let It Ride integrates life's struggles at midlife by way of disintegration. These poems argue for a life that is more than amusement—rather, a mythic venture waiting to be embodied, embarked upon. Let It Ride show us that, sometimes, if you happen to get lucky, if you have the good fortune to jot a few things down—you just might stand a chance to walk away from the crowded table with shreds of your soul intact.
Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas, Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Mahealani Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
The Cowherd’s Son by Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir uses his queer and mixed-caste identities as grace notes to charm alienation into silence. Mohabir's inheritance of myths, folk tales, and multilingual translations make a palimpsest of histories that bleed into one another. A descendant of indentureship survivors, the poet- narrator creates an allegorical chronicle of dislocations and relocations, linking India, Guyana, Trinidad, New York, Orlando, Toronto, and Honolulu, combining the amplitude of mythology with direct witness and sensual reckoning, all the while seeking joy in testimony.
To Afar From Afar by Soham Patel
This collection hinges on the image of a globe. Composed as three long poems in the second person interrupted by a visual fragmented movement. The modes address (to afar/from afar) are informed by distances made by war and globalization. With collage, maps, lyric nonfictions, storytelling, chants, sonnets, treated screenshots, a sestina, and new family pictures of old places –– this book addresses displacement, memory and the darkness and light they bring.
Marianna’s Beauty Salon by Bushra Rehman
“Bushra Rehman's debut collection singes in its interrogation of the American dream while capturing the lives of a neighborhood in transition. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving.” –Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago
The Foley Artist by Ricco Siasoco
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world. These nine stories give voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America: a straight woman attends her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine; a college-bound teenager encounters his deaf uncle in Manila; Asian American drag queens duke it out in the annual Iowa State Fair; a seventy-nine-year-old Foley artist recreates the sounds of life, but is finally unable to save himself.
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
Giovanni Singleton writes, "LUCY 72 is an intricate, multi-faceted, rarely used underhand serve executed with the power and skill of a masterful languager. Wilson undertakes and asserts a new kind of self-reflexive portraiture in which all manner of 'body' is addressed. The body historical, the racial body, the flesh body, all gather in an open-air refusal to conform, to resign. Here agency is fiercely nuanced––petaled and thorned...the gloves have come off. Raise your racquet. Loose your head and heart. These poems are a guidebook of rosary beads for crossing the street, returning an out wide serve, and for being transcendently human."
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
How can a search for self‑knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi’s poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. This collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.