Assaracus Issue 26: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry (THE RETURN ISSUE!)

Assaracus 26
A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry
The Return Issue - October 2025
978-1-943977-87-1
140 Pages
Publication Date: October 28, 2025

This issue will ship on or around October 28, 2025.

WARNING: THIS LITERARY JOURNAL CONTAINS EXPLICIT GAY/QUEER POETRY including SEX, LOVE, RAGE, HUMOR, SPIRITUALITY, FUCKERY, and JOY.

After years away, Assaracus roars back to life: fluid, defiant, unapologetic, and gloriously multiple. Assaracus Issue 26 revives the journal that never played it safe. This time it's louder, queerer, and more unruly, cracking open the doors to a wilder range of voices. In the spirit of the gritty, imperfect, bold poetry magazines and presses of the '70s and '80s, this issue hums with risk, bite, and desire. This isn't for tenure. This is tenacity.

Inside, you'll find poems that lunge from queer spirituality to streetwise memory, from spitfire humor to bare-knuckled vulnerability. These poets don't whisper. They shout, confess, seduce, and provoke. Together they're queering the page even further, reshaping what gay and queer poetry can be.

Featuring work from:

Chen Chen - award-winning poet of tenderness, wit, and unabashed gay joy.
Daniel Diamond - rediscovered AIDS-era poet, bringing archival fire back to light.
Anthony DiPietro - writing sex, survival, and queer ecstasy.
Jack Drago - punk ritualist of lust and revelation.
Mattie Frye - narratives of gender, survival, and Southern lineage.
Andrew Hahn - fierce queer reckonings with God and the body.
Baruch Porras Hernandez - bold, comedic, erotic, and full of heat.
Amir Rabiyah - trans poetics of cartography, resilience, and redefinition.
Megan Volpert - incisive, sharp-witted queer intellectual play.
Ian Young - legendary Canadian poet and archivist, returning to the page.
Bryan Borland - editor, founder, and poet, claiming his space with "Bryan's Poem."

This issue is both a homecoming and a departure: the gay poetry of Assaracus now queered, widened, and cracked open to a chorus of identities and lineages. It's all disturb / enrapture and a necessary reminder that queer poetry saves, disrupts, and survives.