Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore some of the amazing books the SIU Press is celebrating for Pride Month.
Relationships between law enforcement and LGBTQ+ communities have always been varied and complex. On one hand, history is filled with incidents of police harassment: raids that sparked famous uprisings and rebellions; shoddy police investigations into the murders of LGBTQ+ community members; a corrosive organizational culture marked by heteronormativity and misogyny. Yet positive changes are being made, such as the creation of LGBTQ+ police associations, participation by police officers in Pride Parades around the world, and formal apologies for past actions. Q Policing: LGBTQ+ Experiences, Perspectives, and Passions, edited by Roddrick Colvin, Angela Dwyer, and Sulaimon Giwa as part of the Perspectives on Crime and Justice series, features eighteen contributors from around the world who explore the nature of the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and the police.
In Tory Adkisson’s The Flesh Between Us, also from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, the speaker explores our connections to each other, whether they be lovely or painful, static or constantly shifting, or, above all, unavoidable and necessary. Intensely and unapologetically homoerotic in content and theme, The Flesh Between Us sensuously conducts the meetings between strangers, between lovers, between friends and family, between eater and eaten, between the soul and the body that contains it. Pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally acceptable for gay and erotic content and themes, the poems adapt persona, Greek mythology, Judaism, and classic poetic forms to interrogate the speaker’s relationship to god and faith, to love and sex, to mother and father.
These books and more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
