Queer Heartache is a full length poetry collection adapted from Kit Yan's award-winning one-person slam poetry theater show with the same name. Kit's poetry explores his identity as transgender, queer, Asian American from Hawaii, while asking what queer hearts and families are made of and interrogating the forces that are constantly working to break them apart. Queer Heartache is a testament to the resilience of queer love in all its forms--between cis and trans siblings, lovers, pride parade attendees, and many more--in the face of heartbreaking barriers everywhere from the dating pool to the medical establishment. If you've ever had your heart broken, wondered how your pets self-identify, or wanted to tell someone your gender is none of their business, this book is for you. So wrap yourself in a rainbow and enjoy the ride.

This book engages with the concept “queer battle fatigue,” which is the everyday exhaustion that LGBTQIA+ people and communities often experience from anti-queer norms and values. Contributors express how this concept is often experienced across spaces and places, from schools to communities. Queer Battle Fatigue is one way to express the everyday exhaustion that LGBTQIA+ people and communities often feel that is a result sociopolitical and cultural anti-queer norms and values. In this volume, contributors think about how queer battle fatigue hits bodies and their multiple ways of being, knowing, and doing. Chapters describe how such violence flows from early childhood experiences to universities and across community spaces. Contributors also describe how people and communities resist and refuse anti-queer norms and values, carving out pathways to live, love, and have joy despite everyday oppressions. From calling on Black queer ancestors, to using STEM education as a safe space, to artistic representations of identities, the chapters in Queer Battle Fatigue ask readers to consider how to disrupt and deconstruct anti-queer norms while also engaging in the many beautiful forms of queer joy as an act of resistance. Queer Battle Fatigue will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Education, Qualitative Research, Queer Theory and Gender Studies, Educational Research and Curiculum Studies. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

BREAKING DOWN THE WALLS OF HEARTACHE: HOW MUSIC CAME OUT

Pembroke. August 4, 1914. On a verandah in town four young people anxiously await news that will change irrevocably the course of their lives. A fifth arrives, out of breath, with the latest bulletin from the telegraph office. War has been declared – and it is their war. At the age of ninety, Grace Craig looks back to her youth and tells the story of the impact of the Great War on her family and friends. Letters from the young men on the Western Front are interwoven with her own memories of the war. Her brother Basil, youngest officer in the No. 1 Canadian Tunnelling Company, fights underground driving mineshafts deep below the tortured earth of no man's land; later, as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps, he flies above the enemy lines amidst the bursting shells. His older brother Ramsey, a lieutenant in the 38th Battalion, fights in the constant mud on the ground, and must lead his men 'over the top' in the face of enemy fire. At home their sister knits socks and scarves, packs boxes to be sent overseas, serves vast quantities of apple pie and ice cream in the canteen at nearby Camp Petawa, and leads the assembled troops in stirring war songs. In November 1916 she braves the U boats and the North Atlantic to spend time with her brothers while they are on leave in England. Divided by danger and distance, letters alone allowed contact. The soldiers yearned for everyday news of home; and in Pembroke one waited for, and kept forever, those precious scraps of paper from beyond the sea. But This is Our War is a moving, absorbing document of young Canadians at war.

This powerful poetry collection seeks to map the emotional and spiritual territory of diaspora, violence, abuse, and exile. Kai Cheng incorporates autobiographical details from her own childhood and adult life with the rhythms of the oral storytelling tradition and fairytale motifs, poignantly depicting the plight of trans women of color.