A Poetry Mixtape Edited by Angelic Goldsky
Angelic's Liner Notes
I am glad to have put together "Rainbow Intimacies" for you. This is an anthology of 2SLGBTQQIA+ poets, who each spark within them a delicate flowering of power - and possibility, a revolutionary call to self love. "Rainbow Intimacies" is an exploration of Queer intimacy experiences - and I am honoured to share these poems with you. They are of love, loss, mourning while reckoning with ways these queer and trans intimacies weave with the face of the earth, rainbows, water, plant matter. How the world around us can call us back to a sense of self and possibility, even if that is sometimes through revolution or rebellion. These poems do not shy away from difficulty or grief, bypassing through looking towards forests or mountains - but instead they integrate how our queerness and transness live, breathe and find an essential life force - that might sometimes be easier to locate outside of us.
Assembling this collection, I look at Rainbow Intimacies as intimacy found in the landscape - as intimacy that exists even in the difficulty of grief, religious trauma, patriarchal violence and exhaustion - we find this queer possibility around us, of the earth. Bernard Ferguson wrote “the green do what I cannot,” and Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote “eat enough plants to remember what water can do."
The poets shared in "Rainbow Intimacies" - pull us back into our queer bodies, into the life force that we are made of. Bringing forth the words of Kai Cheng Tom, who wrote in her poem “You are not a political experiment, or symbol, or token, or tool, 17. you are precious, 18. you are whole, 19. you are essential” - she describes a possibility of love for the queer community that needs to be spoken out loud. I wanted to call her voice in, as somebody directly advocating and saying the words with no possibility of interpretation - that our queerness is essential.
And as all essential things, we must honour it.
I am humbled to include brilliant writers and creators in this anthology, which is a summation of how among the forests, our dreams, our pain, we still find our self-love, the apologies we deserve, and we reclaim who we were always meant to be as queer people connected to our radical and authentic truth.
The Poems
J-Card (PDF)
Recommended reading
Poets & poems & quotes
- "Your silence will not protect you" - Audre Lorde (a book, but also recall the line itself)
- "I am both the decay and the bloom - a rebirth illegible to my own blood and kin" - Lin Pang in Kait/Lin
- “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open." - Muriel Rukeyser 1968, Kathe Kollwitz