Assaracus Issue 27: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry

Assaracus 27
A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry
January 2026
978-1-943977-89-5
164 Pages
Publication Date: January 29, 2026

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Assaracus 27 is built of sweat, intellect, politics, kink, tenderness, rage, and the holy mess of being alive in a queer body. This issue features work by:

Kevin Bertolero — Intimate cinematic devotionals, queer cinephilia, and the body remembered in scent, light, travel, and desire; poems that move like film stills developing underwater.
Theresa Davis — A powerhouse of humor, heartbreak, and righteous fury. Sex, politics, breakups, self-preservation, mothering, and Black queer survival alchemized into performance-level poetry on the page.
Jai Dulani — Trans poetics at full voltage: protest, diaspora, childhood queer awakenings, memory shards, Brooklyn nights, bodywork, tenderness, and political fire braided into lyric testimony.
Jack Fritscher — Our leather laureate brings erotic history, Mineshaft archives, Mapplethorpe elegies, war-born memory, and queer mythology rewritten in sweat and shadow.
Alex Gildzen — An elder’s clarity and wit. Stonewall nights, lovers past, persimmons, poolsides, pancakes, memory as erotic geography, and long life as open-armed queer witness.
Mickie Kennedy — Daring, devastating, darkly funny explorations of the gay body under duress: cancer, kink, love, betrayal, survival, pornography, childhood wounds, and the fucked-up beauty of being alive.
Drien Thompson — A rising voice of lush queer longing, Black embodiment, sketchbook confessions, tenderness, sex, metaphysics, and desire rendered with painterly attention.
David Trinidad — A major gay literary figure excavates San Francisco in the ’70s in a long autobiographical masterwork: cruising, poetry workshops, Patti Smith, the Tenderloin, sex in the park, film obsessions, and the making of a poet.
Al VanSickle — Queer Southern gothic intensity, girlhood tremors, hunger spells, shaking bones, tenderness sharpened into warning, cicada nights, body doubt turned into body truth, monsters under the bed, desire whispered through teeth, and the fragile, feral work of loving yourself back into shape.
Matthew Williams — Rural queer memory stripped to the nerve: barns, shame, lowercase survival, sex for comfort, sex for distraction, hangovers, bathhouse ghosts, broken rules, Kentucky dirt, unvarnished confession, late-night self-reckoning, and a librarian’s heart trying to catalog what hurt and what held.
PLUS we give Essex Hemphill the issue’s last word — A legend of Black gay poetics and a voice that carved space for generations of LGBTQ+ poets to speak their desire without fear.

COVER ART: "Drag King at Cake Bar on Avenue B, 1996" by Efrain John Gonzalez — Underground iconographer of New York’s feral nights: leather, latex, backroom heat, drag life, dungeon floors, boot prints, and flashbulb sweat. His camera caught the city alive, kinky, unrepentant, and shaking the walls.

THIS IS A PRE-ORDER TITLE. TITLE WILL SHIP BY THE PUBLICATION DATE.