Join us and fourteen poems this December 17th to celebrate some of the most exciting queer contemporary poets around, offering a snapshot into diverse stories from around the globe. Issue 15 features both emerging and established poets, with poems celebrating queerness from across the spectrum. Whether it's a reimagined femme icon Princess Diana or the end of a summer affair, whether it's shaving your head with a loved one or remembering a teenage romance, there's a poem here for you.
Poets featured:
William Rayfet Hunter is a queer, non-binary British-Jamaican writer, essayist, and poet, based in London. Their debut novel Sunstruck won the Merky Books New Writers’ Prize and they have had their non-fiction writing published by VICE, Dazed, and The Evening Standard. This is their first poetry publication.
Clara-Læïla Laudette is a writer and journalist. After reading English at Oxford, she studied Arabic in Palestine. She’s worked mainly in media, most recently as foreign correspondent for Reuters in Madrid. Clara-Læïla writes in English, French, Spanish, and some Arabic. She’s studying for a Creative Writing MA at Goldsmiths. She won Magma Poetry’s 2023/24 Judge’s Prize. Her poems were shortlisted for the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition and Mslexia’s Women’s Poetry prize. Her work is forthcoming in the Poetry Review and has appeared in Poetry Review, Propel Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Pulp Poets Press, and others.
Cia Mangat is a poet from London. Her work has been published in gal-dem, Propel, and bath magg, and has been broadcast by the BBC. She loves writing about bodies, gossip, and Lady Di, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with The Poetry Business in 2025.
Ryan Ormonde is a gay man, a carer, and a poet with work published in Perverse, The Rialto, and Gutter magazine. Ryan has collaborated with poet Karenjit Sandhu for Magma and has an ongoing collaboration with artist and film maker Mădălina Zaharia.
Richard Scott is based in London, UK. His first book Soho (Faber & Faber, 2018) was a Gay’s the Word Book of the Year and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. His second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2025.
Jack Westmore is a poet and software engineer from London, UK. He has previously been published in Tin Can Poetry and & Change. Jack is a past recipient of the Tower Poetry Prize (2nd place) and is a co-editor of the literary journal Seaford Review.