ToPoJo Vol.9: Gender / Queer / Here

"Is there something that sets apart queer poets in Japan from other artists of the spoken word? Are we guilty of creating a myopic binary view of the poetic continuum here? We'd like to think that someday, one's gender/sex/sexuality wouldn’t matter in our appreciation for a poem, but that time hasn't arrived yet. So we ask ourselves again what is our criteria for selecting poems that would represent the LGBTIQAA perspectives or communities? If we look up at the summer sky at night we see a bright band stretching all the way across from North to South, our Milky Way Galaxy. With the naked eye, a nebulous flow, but with a telescope, we can resolve myriads of individual stars. This volume is our telescope, and we realize we can't adequately represent the whole queer Galaxy, but we can state this is a first scan of said Galaxy."

––from intro, by Barbara Summerhawk

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