QUEER LIFE, QUEER LOVE.
VOLUME 2
Matt Bates
Review by Eric Page
This second installment of selected writing chosen by editors from Muswell Press is a uber Queer celebration of the best writing from the global margins. 44 poems, essays, stories and short fiction, bundled up into this anthology offering unique perspectives of our world through the Queer lens. As in the volume 1, there is a focus on both established writers and an effort to bring new writers front and centre by showcasing their work and differing narrative forms.
These stories hold the beat of Queerness strong; it pounds through the plots, prose and ideas shared between these pages, holding up to the light, pressing close in the shadows, highlighting in ultra neon, throwing the most fabulous shade, the intersectional voices of the authors are seriously diverse. The fascinating, the forbidden, the subversive, and even the mundane, but all works that express the view from outside, but folding that back inside to share our views, our space, our authentic lives.
From the deeply serious to the rather funny, from epic leaps of the imagination to the gritty clarity of autobiographical extracts, all Queer life is here offered up to the discerning reader with a blunt, brutal, and beguiling authenticity which engages from the first page. Pick it up and drop open randomly and dive into the thrilling stories, or methodically work your way from front to back, or back to front, of course, if you’re non-rectoverso reader.
I enjoy the opportunity to explore new writers and a broad anthology is an easy way to do this, the team at Muswell Press have excelled at bringing together a real range of voices here, diverse, inclusive, engaging and challenging. It also included a few writers who frankly didn’t engage with me at all, but that’s the glory of a wide collection, you can just skip the ones you don’t like. I don’t want my books to lead me into familiar pastures, I want them to take me off into the unknown, the different, the wild, the possible. Queer Life, Queer Love does just that, with passion, verve, and a thrilling disregard for convention.
Out now £9.99
For more info or to buy the book see the publisher’s website here:
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