Let’s be clear from the off, this isn’t a soft-focus puff piece. I don’t do reverence for reverence’s sake. But I do care deeply about the kind of work that tries to say something real, even when it falters. out.skirts is a brave and necessary anthology. It’s not perfect, what is? But it pulses with life, tension, tenderness, and rage in all the right places. And that matters. It is important and my guest editors at The Broken Spine have done me proud.
Those editors, Perry Gasteiger and Romina Ramos, haven’t stitched together a neat, digestible collection. Instead, they’ve curated something messy in the best sense, queer voices that don’t beg to be understood, but invite us to sit in discomfort, joy, contradiction. The book opens with Romina’s Becoming, a stunner of an opener:
“I was born / from sand turned salt / turned fluid thing.”
It’s not just lyrical, it’s intentional. It understands lineage, gender, transformation, and the power of refusing the binary, poetically and politically. I reread it four times before moving on.
Danielle Free’s Blushing stopped me in my tracks. It reads like flash fiction with a poetic soul, honest, awkward, exploratory. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but the internal tension is masterful. The speaker teeters between confession and repression, especially in lines like:
“I sweat anxiety. Was she thinking about my tits? I wanted her to think about them.”
That’s not coy. That’s brave. And it earns its vulnerability without performance.
Valentine Jones, whose Why’s It So Flimsy? Everything Blares Behind It is quoted in the anthology’s intro, delivers a searing meditation on sensory overload and the fragility of perception. Their language is odd in the best way:
“Brains are too sensitive / quivering wet mounds of flesh…”
There’s something bodily and philosophical here — the idea that our own consciousness is barely holding itself together, and that queerness, neurodivergence, and art all live at that edge. It might not land for everyone, but it doesn’t need to.
Elsewhere, Ankh Spice’s Babysitting at the Community Garden is tender and unshowy, the kind of poem that hides its complexity under dirt-streaked fingernails. It’s one of the most effective pieces in the anthology, grounded, alive, and subtle. This is peak Spice!
“Everyone assumes. No man would nurture what he didn’t sow.”
That line alone deserves its own conversation.
The real achievement of out.skirts isn’t uniformity, it’s plurality. Voices like Lue Mac’s in The Gender of Elastic bend form to reflect fluidity, contradiction, wit. Taylor Kovach’s The Provident Son Reveals gets to the point with sharpness and brevity. Ruth Harley’s A Lesbian Priest Goes to Pride is luminous: full of spirit, ritual, disco and defiance.
“This blessing bounces off a glitter ball…”
That’s theology with teeth and sequins.
If you’re looking for safe, polished queer poetry that ticks diversity boxes and avoids rough edges, this isn’t the book. And that ain’t a bad thing, because out.skirts isn’t here to soothe. It’s here to show, not just queer lives, but queer ways of seeing, thinking, remembering, and imagining futures. It’s a book built on guts and grace, edited by two poets who give a damn.
