With calm abandon, Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel incorporates the visionary into everyday life, inhabiting patterns of relation that do not rely on easy categories. Working from the premise that poetry is indistinguishable from the life of the poet, Schlegel considers how his relationship to the creative process is forever changed when he becomes something new to someone else. “The meaning I’m trying to protect is,” Schlegel writes, “the heart is neither boy, nor girl.” In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps is a tender search for the mother in the father, the poet in the parent, the forest in the human.

What questions would you ask a doctor at a comedy gig?...Is it healthy to sleep with a pet? What are the side effects of budgie-smuggling? Is horse riding riskier that ecstasy? Do love eggs need to be fitted? Do unlucky beds exist? Do doctors ever pretend to hear noises with a stethoscope? Should I hand-wash my merkin? Do you need three hands to put a condom on properly? Is it safe to fall asleep with a penis enlarger on? What should I do if someone dies on me during sex? GP and comedian Phil Hammond is easier to see on stage than in the surgery, but he always leaves time for questions. Here are 250 of life's quirkiest queries, lovingly collected from audiences across the UK. Some people put a hand straight up, others prefer a shy drop into Dr Phil's secret sack. Open wide for the finest answers to the most bizarre questions, ranging from tongue in cheek to absolutely filthy...yet surprisingly useful.

The Book of Jane is a perceptive, tenacious investigation of gender, authority, and art. Jennifer Habel draws a contrast between the archetype of the lone male genius and the circumscribed, relational lives of women. Habel points repeatedly to discrepancies of scale: the grand arenas of Balanchine, Einstein, and Matisse are set against the female miniature—the dancer’s stockings, the anonymous needlepoint, the diary entry, the inventory of a purse.

Lo maps the deprivation and richness of a rural girlhood and offers an intimate portrait of the woman—tender, hungry, hopeful—who manages to emerge. In a series of lyric odes and elegies, Lo explores the notion that we can be partially constituted by lack—poverty, neglect, isolation. The child in the book’s early sections is beloved and lonely, cherished and abused, lucky and imperiled, and by leaning into this complexity the poems render a tentative and shimmering space sometimes occluded, the space occupied by a girl coming to find herself and the world beautiful, even as that world harms her.

""What will be possible / when I'm no longer sorry?" asks the speaker of THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING after the sudden death of a parent. "What do lost daughters burst into?" In this debut collection by Emily Pittinos, the speaker is tasked with relearning the ways of loneliness, family, sex, and wilderness as a person who feels thoroughly and abruptly without. Shaped by both concision and unfolding sequences, THE LAST UNKILLABLE THING is a journey across landscapes of mourning where "in [the] periphery, every shadow / is a new dead thing." The light of these poems takes on the tint of grief, and through that light the speaker reexamines what remains: her changed self, her desire, the midwestern flora, the unyielding snow. Interior and exterior ecologies blur until loss becomes a place of its own, and the only inevitability. "Doesn't it hurt," Pittinos writes, "to be human. I'm so human, I could die.""--

Part wunderkammer, part grimoire, Maggie Queeney’s In Kind is focused on survival. A chorus of personae, speaking into and through a variety of poetic forms, guide the reader through the aftermath of generations of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, before designing a transformation and rebirth. These are poems of witness, self-creation, and reclamation.

"Home is a complex ideation for many POC and migrant peoples. I Always Carry My Bones explores how familial history echoes inside a person and the ghosts of lineage dwell in a body. Sometimes we haunt. Sometimes we are the haunted. Pierced by an estranged relationship to Mexican culture, the ethereal ache of an unknown father, the weight of racism and poverty in this country, the indentations of abuse, and a mind/physicality affected by doubt, these poems root in the search for belonging-a belonging inside and outside the flesh. Space-making requires a clawing at the atrocities of today's social injustices. Space-making requires a dismantling of violent systems against brown and black bodies. Home is the place where the horrid and beautiful intertwine and carve a being into existence. At times, the reaction is recoil: "biomimicry-how I adapt away/ from you-biomimicry-as if to chant my way/ into something worthy of your affection." At other times, the reaction is love: "if we fracture a system long enough/ our voices build/ a neoteric system/ with our voices inside." The voices in these poems are never truly singular. POC, trans/queer individuals and all marginalized people hold evolutionary revolutions in our cells. In language and elements, we are a collective. Survival held in our adaptation-another action that culls from us. We summon the magic inside of us to create a world in which we see ourselves beyond the death expected of us. We pray to our own tongues to conjure ourselves into existence. This book longs for a sanctuary of self-the dwelling of initial energy needed for our collective fight for human rights"--

Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics. The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love, and from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, the contributors demonstrate the complexity and diversity of classical sexuality. They also show that the ethics of eros, in both Greece and Rome, shared a number of commonalities: a focus not only on self-mastery, but also on reciprocity; a concern among men not just for penetration and display of their power, but also for being gentle and kind, and for being loved for themselves; and that women and even younger men felt not only gratitude and acceptance, but also joy and sexual desire. Contributors: * Eva Cantarella * Kenneth Dover * Chris Faraone * Simon Goldhill * Stephen Halliwell * David M. Halperin * J. Samuel Houser * Maarit Kaimio * David Konstan * David Leitao * Martha C. Nussbaum * A. W. Price * Juha Sihvola

“At the edge of a field a thought waits,” writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode. Here is a voice slowed by an erotics suffused with pain, quickened by discovery. In masterful long poems and refracted lyrics, Donish flips the coin of subjectivity; different and potentially dangerous faces are revealed in turn. With lyricism as generous as it is exact, Donish tunes her writing as much to the colors, textures, and rhythms of daily life as to what violates daily life—what changes it from within and without.

Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.