Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we wrap up our celebration of Pride Month with some additional SIU Press selections.
Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family.
In his affecting poetry debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.”
In the poetry collection Strange Valentine, A. Loudermilk utilizes confessional, persona, and third-person poems throughout this intimate yet socially conscious first collection. Strange Valentine is an indictment of love, fixating on the paranoid relationship between body and state, on the dangerous relationship between family history and sexual history, and on the elusive relationship between gender and sexuality—specifically as experienced in the working-class towns of the southernmost Midwest.
These titles and more this week on Inside The Blanket Fort.
