Bend Don't Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire

Author(s): T. Cole Rachel & Rita D. Costello (Eds.)

Young Adult | Poetry

"I get all weepy that this book didn't exist when I was in high school. And I'm totally charged that when a girl kisses a girl under a street light, there's an xtra echo case she read it in a poem." - Eileen Myles (Author of Cool For You)


A poetry anthology for young adults that realistically and beautifully deals with what it means to come of age gay, lesbian, transgender, or, as is perhaps more often the case in adolescence, totally confused.


Out of the silences of childhood comes a collection of startling, beautiful portraits of queer adolescents, as they stagger across a landscape of violent first desire (so many crushes), covert glimpses, and tentative transformation into something new, something free and honest. These poems find their power in a language forged by desire and survival, putting into words what had only been felt, risked, endured. The editors have succeeded in recreating the very nature of our charged adolescence, a time when nascent queers pick up and cast off identities and poses like so many t-shirts, before coming into their own skin, their own bodies. As one peom so eloquently captures it, "I think there's more/Than one queer truth"--a truth amply demonstrated by this anthology. (Charles Flowers, Associate Director of The Academy of American Poets)


If Bend, Don't Shatter had been around when I was fifteen, crazy with confusion about love and sex, full of fear and hope, it would have changed my life. not only to know that there were other kids hurting from prejudice and fear, but to know that there were others who felt so much joy, who were alive with possibility. These poems are for every young person who feels alone and full of longing, struggling with what it means to be a queer kid; you won't feel so alone when you read this book." (Mark Doty, winner of the National book Critics Circle Award for My Alexandria)


"Bend, Don't Shatter presents a stunning collection of poems that sometimes shout and other times whisper the restless yearning and comic ironies of growing up different." (Alex Sanchez, Author of Rainbow Boys and Rainbow Girls)

$22.95 AUD

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Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781932360172
  • : Soft Skull Press US
  • : Soft Skull Press US
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 111
  • : English
  • : PAPERBACK
  • : T. Cole Rachel & Rita D. Costello (Eds.)