Star Power: Poems by Nicholas Goodly

Description

Star Power: Poems
by Nicholas Goodly
Paperback | ISBN: 1668080761

Radiant, defiant, and bursting with cultural electricity, Star Power is a poetry collection that celebrates the beauty, resilience, humor, and imaginative force of Black queer life.

In poems that shimmer with reverence and playfulness, Nicholas Goodly constructs a personal constellation of saints, icons, survivors, and pop culture legends. From ballroom pioneer Venus Xtravaganza to Grace Jones, Tiffany Pollard, the Olsen Twins, Thundercat, and the Wonder Twins, these poems honor figures often dismissed, overlooked, or misunderstood by the wider world while elevating them into mythic symbols of endurance, transformation, and joy.

At once deeply personal and culturally expansive, Star Power explores what it means to exist at the margins while refusing invisibility. Goodly’s work moves fluidly between tenderness and boldness, grief and celebration, humor and rage, crafting a poetic landscape where queer Black existence becomes sacred, vibrant, and undeniably powerful.

The collection confronts histories of oppression and erasure without surrendering to them. Instead, these poems carve out space for pleasure, intimacy, memory, fantasy, and survival. Pop culture references become acts of reclamation. Nostalgia transforms into testimony. Everyday queer life becomes epic.

Written with musicality, emotional clarity, and striking imagery, Star Power is both a love letter and a declaration: a celebration of the communities, influences, and chosen icons that shape identity and sustain hope in hostile worlds.

Inventive, emotionally resonant, and unapologetically alive, Star Power is perfect for readers of contemporary poetry, Black queer literature, LGBTQ+ art, and culturally rich collections that blend personal experience with fearless imagination.