I Feel Love Notes on Queer Joy

by Samantha Mann (Editor), Greg Mania (Contributor), John DeLamar (Contributor)

Celebrate adoration and exhilaration within these pages, featuring an anthology of talented voices within the LGBTQIA+ community. Told in multi-faceted layers of memoir, creative nonfiction, and poetry, each contributor shares a priceless event or moment where they discovered their own queer joy.

The stories in I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy focus on finding devotion within yourself and with others. Their powerful prose invites us into these very personal moments and recognizes that being who you are is a precious gift we all deserve.

The mission of this anthology is to be inclusive among its participants, establishing a series of experiences that will have the LGBTQIA+ community and its allies delighting in the beauty that is queer love.

Join us in this collection that honors queer voices through the delightful pleasure in everyday occurrences.

I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy is edited by Samantha Mann, the author of Putting Out: Essays on Otherness. Her work has been featured in Elle, Romper, BUST, Miss Representation, and The Audacity.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2022

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. “While media representation concentrates on queer stories surrounding [pain, loss and longing], they do so at the expense of breezing past the magic,” Mann writes. This mixed-form collection seeks to center that very magic and does so in a way that was breezy and delectable. I love the way this anthology explores joy in all forms — small fleeting moments, self-love, healing, romance — and the way that joy often blossoms out of struggle. This juxtaposition underscores the editor’s thesis that, given their hardship, queer people are often able to experience, uncover, capture and cultivate fleeting joy better than most. Favorite entries included “Permanent Record”, “On Being Same-Sex Attracted”, “The Ridiculous Flamingo Dilemma”, “Hot Sand, Beach Plums, and Elvira”, and “Belly Kisses.”

[Hayden Wathen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely accomplishes what Mann sets out for: community, diversity, shared and not shared experience, sadness and joy, forever growth. I feel love, indeed.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5