FOGLIFTER 2019 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

Whether surrounded by your chosen family or family of origin, you deserve to have your nose in a book this holiday season, so here are a few wonderful ones by Foglifter contributors to light up the darkest nights of the year:

The first, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Advantages of Being Evergreen, is described as gorgeous and curative by our EIC, and you can read more at The Adroit Journal.

Contributor Lidia Yuknavitch raves about Rae Gouirand’s The History of Art, saying: “Holy mother of fuck. If Adrienne Rich wrote prose, it would come out something like this.”

Contributor Ching-In Chen describes Zefyr Lisowski’s Blood Box as “mysterious and evocative, terrifying and tender.”

Although she’s not a contributor (yet!), another incredible release this year was Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium. And we were lucky enough to interview Shira for the blog—“I have a practice of looking up at the sky and trying to imagine, to really feel in my bones, how far up the sky really goes. It’s overwhelming. Because it never stops. Can you feel that possibility, that impossibility, the truth of vastness? How much on this earth can’t be accounted for. How deep the mystery is. And then, to take it personally, to think: I am that. I am just like that sky.”

Dorothy Chan’s second collection, Revenge of the Asian Woman, is described by “dizzyingly lush and empowered excess” by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and we’re so excited that Dorothy will be completing the trilogy with Chinese Girl Strikes Back from Spork Press in 2020!

And, speaking of 2020, Kay Ulanday Barrett is another writer who continues to amaze. You can read their first book When the Chant Comes now, and also preorder the next, More Than Organs, from our friends at Sibling Rivalry Press.

Arhm Choi Wild’s debut collection, Cut to Bloom, is available for preorder now.

And we couldn’t be more excited about Justin Phillip Reed’s next book, The Malevolent Volume, which is also available for preorder. 

Finally, we have to recommend our own beloved publications, starting with this year’s Queer Ancestors Project anthology, The Flower of Ancestry—a compendium of QTPOC youth writing and printmaking—and Still Here Productions’ anthology of QTPOC writers born in the San Francisco Bay Area, both of which are available at our shop.

And, of course, we published two amazing issues of our literary journal this year, featuring the best in LGBTQ+ writing, with the likes of torrin greathouse, Bettina Judd, Joseph O. Legaspi, Roberto F. Santiago, sam sax, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Megan Ellis, Luther Hughes, Emilia Phillips, and TC Tolbert—which, along with a subscription, are available for purchase at our shop! 

So, happiest of holidays from the Foglifter fam—and happy reading!