The Small Queer Press Book Club is a continuous 2026 book club at The Pond aiming to uplift queer published works from smaller -mostly indie and micro- presses focusing on diverse stories of LGBTQIA+ life and people.

The book club will run in 2-3 month cycles, each cycle focusing on a different press.

In March to May we are exploring the works from Nightboat Books. For March we are reading “Unsex Me Here” by Aurora Mattia:

Please hold. There's someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.

Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. 

Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.

Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk. They focus on poetry and unconventional works.

Read more about them here: https://nightboat.org/

*no reader commitment!*
- read the book, or start reading it
- show up to the discussion
- no sign ups needed
- you can go to one, or some, or all
- book club is held monthly
- 2-3 month cycles highlighting a different queer press
- the books are available at The Pond
- the books are in english, mostly fiction

There are copies of the book available at The Pond for a 10% discount!

If you want to join the bookclub remotely, or track your reading for these books, you can joining the Storygraph challenge for funsies.