Assaracus Issue 26: A Queer Dive Bar Launch Party Reading

After years away, Assaracus roars back to life: fluid, defiant, unapologetic, and gloriously multiple. Assaracus Issue 26 revives the journal that never played it safe. This time it's louder, queerer, and more unruly, cracking open the doors to a wilder range of voices. In the spirit of the gritty, imperfect, bold poetry magazines and presses of the '70s and '80s, this issue hums with risk, bite, and desire. This isn't for tenure. This is tenacity.

Inside, you'll find poems that lunge from queer spirituality to streetwise memory, from spitfire humor to bare-knuckled vulnerability. These poets don't whisper. They shout, confess, seduce, and provoke. Together they're queering the page even further, reshaping what gay and queer poetry can be.

This celebratory reading gathers together poets featured in the issue, including:

Chen Chen - award-winning poet of tenderness, wit, and unabashed gay joy.

Daniel Diamond - rediscovered AIDS-era poet, bringing archival fire back to light.

Anthony DiPietro - writing sex, survival, and queer ecstasy.

Jack Drago - punk ritualist of lust and revelation.

Mattie Frye - narratives of gender, survival, and Southern lineage.

Andrew Hahn - fierce queer reckonings with God and the body.

Baruch Porras Hernandez - bold, comedic, erotic, and full of heat.

Amir Rabiyah - trans poetics of cartography, resilience, and redefinition.

Megan Volpert - incisive, sharp-witted queer intellectual play.

This issue is both a homecoming and a departure: the gay poetry of Assaracus now queered, widened, and cracked open to a chorus of identities and lineages. It's all disturb / enrapture and a necessary reminder that queer poetry saves, disrupts, and survives.