If you loved Varela’s debut, The Town of Babylon (and if you haven’t read it, get on that!) you’re going to love his first story collection, too. It’s a wise, funny, and honest look at queer immigrant life in New York City and beyond. Varela’s characters have anxiety spirals on the subway, deal with racist parents at their kids’ schools, navigate the strange world of UN hookups, and more. His writing is sharp and tender and full of observations about life that both sting and soothe.

This gorgeous collection of poetry is about language, grief, border identity, queerness, masculinity, and so much more. Amparán weaves Spanish and English together into bright, startling poems that cut and mend. The speaker mourns the death of his brother, struggles to find a home for himself in language and art, explores queer desire, and exposes the legacies of violence enacted on Mexican, Mexican American, and queer people along the U.S. Mexico border.

If you’re looking for a poetry book to carry you through the entire month, this volume of Chin’s collected poetry, which spans decades, is perfect. Chin’s poems are long and conversational and intimate; it’s easy to imagine her performing them as spoken word. She writes about her mother, Black lesbian identity, queer joy, Jamaica, activism, New York City, becoming a poet, and so much more. Her words are angry and loving and precise and full of heart.

Gay activist Harry Hay was born on April 7. Hay co-founded the Mattachine Society, the first nationally recognized gay rights organization in the U.S. He was also the founder of the Radical Faeries, a network of mostly gay men focused on radical queer liberation and secular spirituality. The Faeries are still around today! This book collects Hay’s various speeches and other writings. It’s a fascinating look into the eventful life of a thinker and activist who’s had a profound affect on gay life.

This playful, sexy, joyful, silly novel, first published in 1977 and finally reissued in 2020 by Nightboat Books, depicts life on a queer commune, and is inspired by/deeply steeped in radical faerie communities and traditions. The book itself is nearly impossible to describe, but it’s an ode to queer survival and queer joy, a call for solidarity, and a roadmap for community care in the face of overwhelming violence.

Winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, this historical novel was also recently longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for fiction! Set on a four-day train journey across Canada in the 1920s, it follows Baxter, a queer sleeping car porter who’s saving money for dentistry school. It’s a haunting, close, claustrophobic read, and the near-endless depictions of the racism Baxter faces are relentless. Mayr’s writing mirrors the movement of the train, as well as Baxter’s sleep-deprived, hallucinatory state of mind. It’s a brilliant, moving book full of unexpected layers.

This essay collection is a 2023 Lambda Award finalist in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction, but as far as I’m concerned, it should be a finalist for every award ever. Imbler combines thoughtful, creative science writing about sea creatures with stories from their own life. They write about deep sea vents and the sacredness of queer spaces; a mother octopus and disordered eating. The connections are startling and new. Nothing I can write about it will do this book justice. It’s a queer portal into new worlds and possibilities, an example of what happens when writers dare to bust through genre expectations.

If you’re looking for a book that celebrates plants in honor of spring, this is a fantastic, under-the-radar gem. It’s a historical novel based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. Pastan’s protagonist, Kate Croft, arrives at Cornell in the early 1920s, where she falls in love with biology. Over the course of her career, she meets with resistance at every turn, as the men in her field disrespect her, belittle her, and ignore her. You should be prepared to yell while reading this — it’s infuriating — but it’s also a beautiful story about a determined gay scientist and her deep love of the natural world.