A dynamic 20th century queer read unknown until recently
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I fell in love with the 20th century Queer lit a few years ago, and now I look forward to all the queer books that I can from 40, 50, 60, 100 years. It led me to some of my favorite novels (I look at you, Alexis). Love, leda is another. This novel “forgotten” was written by the poet queer Mark Hyatt in the 1960s. Most of Hyatt’s work was published posthumously in the late 1970s and 1980s, but this manuscript was only discovered in the 2020s. The book includes a fantastic intro of Huw Lemmy and a thought by the continuation of Luke Roberts, who edited the manuscript, which gives more Hyatt and the book itself.
Love, leda By Mark Hyatt
This vibrant, funny and poignant range of a novel follows Leda, 20, a gay man from the working class, while he wanders in London in about a week. He bounces from one job to another, from club to club, from man to man. He is extremely alive and unrepentant on this subject – an attractive and casual moment, weighed down by loneliness and cynicism the following. The novel, like Leda, refuses to join any expected story. LEDA is not consumed by the shame of being gay, but it is not really happy either. He is young, alone, angry, carefree, injured, irresponsible, in difficulty, exhausted, contemplative.
I loved this book for the way it so beautifully illuminates the material world (streets, money, cups of coffee, metro) and the inner world of LEDA. But it is also an incredible – and heartbreaking – queer history. It made me think a lot about what is published and what is lost. It contains several scenes of graphic sex, and it is also decidedly of the working class. It is nothing at all like The chariot, Posted in the United Kingdom in 1953, which I also liked. Char of Char is undeniably gay, but it is also undeniably the upper class. It is a novel built in silences, subtext, euphemisms.
Love, ledaOn the other hand, is refreshing in its franchise, in the refusal of LEDA to hide from itself, even if it would be easier or less painful. I felt a little devoid, reading him, asking me how many other novels like this were written and lost, because they – and their authors – did not comply with an “acceptable” standard. I am so happy that this book was finally published and, at the same time, its publication resembles a portal in a thousand invisible archives that I will never see.
By reading it, I felt the same thing that I felt read the intimate newspapers of Lou Sullivan: what a gift, and how desperately I prefer the author of the gift was always there, that the gift would not need to have been given in this way.
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This week, we highlight the best new poetry collections of 2025 (so far)! From deeply personal to powerfully political, many of these collections reflect the Zeitgeist and introduce new voices into poetry. Read the rest for an extract and become an All Access member to unlock the full message.
How is it that we are already more than a quarter of the path until 2025? I am ahead of my reading goals and I always feel so far at the same time. I made a lot of poetry, however, I find a lot of wonderful and surprising voices emerging. It is early, but completely time to check to date some of the best new poetry collections of 2025.
It’s funny how appropriate these collections are. Keep in mind that the publication moves very slowly, so that the books that were published in the first quarter of 2025 were probably completed at the end of 2023 or at the beginning of 2024, seeing only the day recently. Thus, these collections were written as last year’s presidential election approaches. Nevertheless, many of these collections are like guttural reactions to the world at the moment. Incredible how much art and premonitory artists can be, huh?
These collections of poetry pass the whole range of deeply personal to powerfully political. Let’s face it, these two are often the same anyway, especially with regard to poetry. The most exciting for me is the number of these best new poetry collections from 2025 so far are fresh voices of the poetic scene. Let’s do in these collections, okay?
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