Mary Jean Chan

Andrew McMillan

Queer Poetry Anthology

The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?

Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs.

Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan’s magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.

Pity

Earlier versions of some of the poems appeared in various magazines and anthologies.

Physical

Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day. Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard. Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves. It deserves a place on the shelf of every reader keen to discover and rediscover how queer poets speak to one another across the generations.

100 Queer Poems

After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world. Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'. McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.

Pandemonium

In the Western Desert of Australia the land takes hostages. Freedom is regained slowly, often imperceptibly: vanities must be shed, wisdom must be drawn, humility learned. Time moves forward, but only in grinding tectonic shifts, unnoticed by squinting intruders with too much noise in their heads. Twenty-two years ago the young men in Midnight Oil were held hostage by the land. It was only for four weeks, but none of us was ever the same again.

The Blackfella - Whitefella Tour

Strict Rules

Playtime

les hommes pleurent à la salle de sport déclenchent le sèche-mains pour couvrir le bruit de leurs sanglots, leurs cœurs sont devenus trop lourds pour leurs torses, leurs torses sont devenus trop larges pour leurs tee-shirts, ils s’habillent comme des gamins qui auraient oublié d’apporter leur tenue pour l’entraînement Vingt-cinq poèmes pour dire et raconter le corps des hommes, leurs désirs, leur jouissance et leur solitude. Andrew McMillan les observe dans leur intimité, en famille ou encore dans des bars interlopes, et les croque avec justesse dans une langue parfois crue, souvent tendre. Une bouleversante ode au corps masculin qui porte un regard poétique sur l’homme moderne, sa sexualité et sa quête du bonheur. Les vers d’Andrew McMillan sont admirablement transposés en français par l’écrivain Philippe Besson, qui livre ici sa toute première traduction.

Traduit de l'anglais par Philippe Besson

Le corps des hommes

**WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2019** ‘Vivid, accessible and honest, sometimes uncomfortably so’ Alan Bennett, London Review of Books In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood. McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.

Andrew McMillan

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