This omnibus anthology contains the commissioned work from the eighteen excellent queer poets (nine from India and nine for the UK) who have made up the three cohorts of the Language Is A Queer Thing development project from 2022 to 2024 along with a new poem from each of the six poets who then appeared in our celebratory 2025 project. The aim was to create new poetry on the queer experience and the investigate the queering of language to better express that experience.
Moving, profound and eye-opening, this omnibus edition brings the poems of all three cohorts together and is the poetic product of our project, with many of the poems in print for the first time. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed helping to make them.
Poets include: Sanah Ahsan debut collection, I cannot be good until you say it (Bloomsbury, 2024), Mukahanh Limbu, debut pamphlet, Mother if Flip-flops (Out-Spoken Press 2022), Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, debut novel in verse, Bad Queer forthcoming (Faber 2026).
Full List: Sanah Ahsan, Aadrit Banerjee, Hafsa Bukhary, Garfield D'Souza, Ife Grillo, Sara Haque, Megha Harish, Gayathiri Kamalakanthan, Abu Leila, Mukahang Limbu, Jay Mitra, Anil Pradhan, Parth Rahatekar, Amani Saeed, Kirran Shah, Rachit Sharma, Ray VM and Anureet Watta