June is Pride Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of 12 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for Pride Month for more ideas!)
Poetry
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers
BOA Editions | April 8, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781960145451
This is a poetry collection of “unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised.”
Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems by C. Dale Young
Four Way Books | March 15, 2025
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 9781961897328
This poetry collection explores “the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay.”
The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems by César Moro
Translated from the Spanish by Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe
Cardboard House Press | April 15, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 9781945720352
Published in a bilingual edition, The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems is “one of the most remarkable poetic collections of twentieth-century Peru and a key Surrealist text.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781948579247
This poetry collection “studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
Fiction
The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín
Red Hen Press | April 29, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781636282718
In this collection of stories, “historical fiction, horror, and fantasy tangle together in a queer garden of love, grief, and longing.”
On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ
Feminist Press | July 23, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781558613140
This novel is “a lost feminist masterwork by a speculative fiction icon about a lesbian’s coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.”
I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur
Book*Hug Press | April 24, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781771669351
This debut novel is “a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life.”
Coach House Books | May 14, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781552454657
In this novel, “a queer writer travelling through India can’t escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present.”
Nonfiction
Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press | April 2, 2024
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 9781644453360
Like Love: Essays and Conversations is “a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work.”
Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell
LittlePuss Press | April 1, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781964322995
In this essay “set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s,” Blaxell “takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history.”
Dances of Time and Tenderness by Julian Carter
Nightboat Books | June 4, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
ISBN: 9781643622347
This collection is “a cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.”
I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana
Seven Stories Press | July 9, 2024
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9781644213896
This is “a beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature—whose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.”
