It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a lesbian best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco – a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.

A searing memoir about Jaquira Díaz’s girlhood and coming of age in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach. From Díaz’s struggles with depression, identity, and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love, hope, and the person Díaz always wanted to be.

Diannely Antigua's debut collection, Ugly Music, is a cacophonous symphony of reality, dream, trauma, and obsession. The poems span a traumatic early childhood, a religious adolescence, and, later, a womanhood that grapples with learning how to create an identity informed by, yet in spite of, those challenges. What follows is an exquisitely vulgar voice, unafraid to draw attention to the distasteful, to speak a truth created by a collage of song and confession, diary and praise. 

Facing his father’s imminent death, and the unresolved conflict between them, Jay Kirk flees on a whirlwind assignment to find a mysterious manuscript in Transylvania before escaping again to the Arctic Circle. A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the value of experience.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.

Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world—from Rome and London to Dar-es-Salaam and Kampala. After her mother left when she was two and her father’s passing when she was thirteen, she was raised by her stepmother but struggled to come to terms with who she was. Aftershocks follows Nadia as she hauls herself out of turmoil and begins to write her own ground to stand on.