Shade Literary Arts

“the story in me is spineless; it won’t startle for the busy street beyond the bakery glass. on one side, nodding florets of white-headed hydrangeas on limber stems. on the other, a brick wall with orange graffiti that says clit.”

“I’m smacking my rouge lips in the city my body of work is more than where my body ends which I both like and don’t like it means you can catch me but you don’t we’re out of cell range so we don’t know yet that the presi dent is tweeting to provoke war he has an election to win”

A list of 2026 forthcoming poetry books by queer people of color. This list features Ina Carino, Derrick Austin, Phillip B. Williams, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Aja Couchois Duncan, and more!

"I think I can hear the river in the distance or maybe cars, or maybe birds, or maybe the sound of my heart fishing for itself in my chest. Pulling into the driveway after a long day of work, I imagine you inside, conjuring up light, making beauty from the inbetween minutes of dusk."

"yes, little else to do but delay the decay & fit him for a stiff suit from the cheap fashion district, while his mother thanks Almighty that she will bury her son proper. nearing the end, he pens silent elegies for all the selves he kills for a bought dignity."

"i’ve lost and wanted i couldn’t invent myself out of loneliness i was stuck wondering what’s another bullet whose arms in another chest would welcome me haunted"

"I am what shouldn’t be listened to twice in rough succession. in a dialect, a tribe name their babies by throwing a salver down the stairs & filtering the sound to suit a modern calling. I am chaos in that manner, casualty to be owned by a body. "

"When her dress was too short to hold despair, her hands urging to exchange hurt for ecstasy. She vogues cunt like 2,3,4. Pose. 5 and 6, dip — so we don’t forget, some Legends are not a myth, but a call for emerging."

"the last time a crush like this survived i was in college: in proximity to a boy who sometimes got called my own name & i sometimes his. i hated this doppelgang— even worse the coincidental attraction— but loved how, in a darkened hallway away from the party, i traced his insides."

"Archila’s syntactical choices refuse silence and instead, indict the Empire through rugged enjambments, nonlinear structure, and an unsettling present. Archila’s S is For offers us a collection of compelling poems so scorching that we too, risk plummeting from the sky like Icaro to follow along, just for a taste of the sun."