April Showers Bring Queer Flowers: Your Curated Queer TBR For Spring

To me, spring will always represent humid greenhouses, trays and trays of tiny seedlings, and long days of planting. (I used to be a farmer.) And while this book is about a lot more than gardening, seeds and plants play a major role. Wilkinson writes about the family stories that have shaped his life, his Uruguayan heritage, immigration and migration, gardening and foraging, queerness, ghosts, fathers and sons, the cost of silence, and a whole lot more. It’s a poetic, experimental memoir that is deeply rooted in the natural world.

I honestly have no idea if this book takes place in the spring or not, but it feels like spring, okay? It’s a quiet sci-fi novel about Dex, a tea monk who lives in a utopian world, but feels increasingly unfulfilled by their life. They decide to wander into the wilderness, in search of answers and meaning, and stumble upon Mosscap, the first robot any human has spoken to in centuries. It’s a balm of a book, full of the beauty of growing things, the splendor of the natural world, the soothing calm of ritual, and the power of thoughtful conversation.

Tran’s debut collection explores the legacies of intergenerational trauma, the aftermath of sexual violence, and the possibilities of queer love and queer language. It’s an ode to survival, both painful and playful. The sheer beauty of the language in these poems left me breathless and stunned. This is definitely a collection I’ll return to again and again.

Donika Kelly is one of my favorite poets working today; she writes especially breathtaking love poems. This collection is about trauma, resilience, healing, and ghosts. It’s brutal and heartbreaking at times, but it’s also a celebration of queer love and selfhood.

If outrageously funny and beautifully heartfelt is your jam, you’re going to want to run to this book. Al-Kadhi grew up in an Iraqi Muslim family in Bahrain and the UK. In this memoir, they write about coming of age as a queer person, their complicated relationship with their mother, their struggles to fit in with white British society, falling in love with drag in college, and their eventual path to self-love and reconnection with their faith. Al-Kadhi’s writing is warm, funny, and inviting — it’s silly and celebratory and thoughtful all at once.

Book Riot contributor Adiba Jaigirdar’s debut novel is thoughtful coming-of-age story about friendship, sisterhood, family, and first love. After coming out to her family, Nishat is desperate for her life to feel normal again; instead, she’s dealing with homophobia from her family and racism from her classmates. When she and her crush Flávia pick the same business idea — henna — for a school competition, it seems like things will only get worse. But it turns out Nishat’s life is full of surprises.

This is not a Passover book, but it is a very Jewish book, and a very queer book. It’s an intense and often deeply painful story about Rachel, an unhappy twentysomething with an eating disorder and a lot of unresolved trauma. When she falls for Orthodox Miriam — her opposite in just about every way — it forces her to confront the things about her life she doesn’t want to look at. My Jewish identity is very different from Rachel’s, but so much of this novel felt deeply familiar to me, and it reminds me how much I appreciate queer Jewish literature. Huge content warning for disordered eating.

This novel is definitely on my Best of 2021 list, so if you missed it, you’re in for a treat. It’s a beautiful family epic about two generations of an Indian American family in suburban Illinois. Twentysomething Akash is miserable, drinking too much, and not out to his family. His mother Renu is preparing to sell the family house and move back to London. Both of them are preoccupied with unresolved relationships from their pasts. When Akash arrives home to help Renu pack up the house, everything they’ve never said to each other begins to spill out.

In this gorgeous memoir-in-essays, Laura Lee writes about mental illness, inherited trauma, caring for her sick mother, and childhood wounds. She also writes about the joy she finds in rock climbing, about her complicated relationship to food and cultural food legacies, about queerness and romantic entanglements, about writing and art, and so much more. It’s a slim book, but a powerful one.

Mother’s Day is a joyful celebration for some people, but for plenty of others it’s complicated, lonely, and stressful. So instead of a breezy, feel-good read for Mother’s Day, why not a book that honors the difficulties and challenges of being a mother? This dual POV novel is about Missy, a successful rock musician, and her mother Carola, who left the family when Missy was a child to pursue her own life. It’s a messy book about tumultuous mother-daughter relationships, the fluidity of identity, aging, music, and more.

Queer poet Adrienne Rich’s birthday falls on May 16. She wrote dozens of poetry collections, as well as several works of memoir and nonfiction, so picking just one was a challenge. This one happens to be a personal favorite of mine. It’s full of the themes that make Rich’s work so good and so accessible: womanhood, motherhood, queerness, feminism, desire, the work of making art. While you’re at it, check out these Adrienne Rich quotes to celebrate her birthday.

Harvey Milk was born on May 30, 1930. There are quite a few books about his life, but I’m partial to this biography, written by queer historian Lillian Faderman. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office when he became a San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977. Faderman writes about his Milk’s life before he became a politician, his time in San Francisco, his assassination, and the legacy of LGBTQ+ rights he left behind.

Spring is the season of new growth, blossoming greenery, and sunshine returning — so why not tackle a queer classic that, shockingly, does not have a tragic ending? This novel is a love story between Maurice, a British aristocrat, and Alec, a working-class gardener. It’s also the story of Maurice’s life, more broadly, which Forster recounts with a lot of nuance and complexity. It was written in 1914, but not published until 1971, shortly after Forster’s death.