REVIEW: Queerphoria: VERVE Voices

Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby's arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment.

Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, 31 writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.

As the inaugural title in the new VERVE Voices series, Queerphoria sets out to celebrate queer joy and supports Switchboard with £1 from every copy sold. That combination of literary ambition and community-minded purpose makes it an especially fitting introduction to a series dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices.

Anthologies are notoriously difficult to review. By their nature, they contain multitudes, and Queerphoria is no exception. Bringing together contributors across fiction, poetry, essays, illustrations and experimental forms, it is an extraordinarily wide-ranging collection whose quality, style and tone inevitably vary from piece to piece.

Yet if a few entries resonate more strongly than others, the anthology's greatest achievement lies in its sheer inclusivity. Few recent collections have attempted to embrace such a broad spectrum of queer experiences, identities and perspectives, and that breadth alone makes Queerphoria a worthwhile read.

The anthology is united by a commitment to exploring joy, but its understanding of joy is refreshingly complex. These writers recognise that queer happiness does not emerge in a vacuum. Instead, joy is presented as something hard won, existing alongside grief, prejudice, loneliness and uncertainty. Across the collection, moments of connection, self-discovery and celebration become acts of resistance in themselves, small but powerful refusals of the narratives that so often define LGBTQ+ lives through struggle alone.

One of the book's particular strengths is its attention to community. Chosen family appears repeatedly throughout the collection, whether through friendships, queer households, romantic partnerships or intergenerational connections that bridge different eras of LGBTQ+ experience. Several pieces emphasise the importance of finding people who see and affirm us, reminding readers that queer belonging is often something actively built rather than inherited.

Wide queer representation sits at the heart of this book, creating a collection that feels genuinely reflective of contemporary LGBTQ+ communities rather than merely paying lip service to diversity. The accompanying contributor biographies reinforce this sense of visibility and care, while individual content notes demonstrate thoughtful editing without disrupting the reading experience.

Among the most memorable contributions are stories that explore intergenerational queer life. Laura Kay's moving tale of an eighty-five-year-old woman entering a queer bar for the first time is touch perfect, capturing both the losses and possibilities that can accompany late-life self-discovery. Equally tender is Santanu Bhattacharya's celebration of Pride through the lens of friendship, love and cultural identity, a reminder that public queer visibility remains deeply significant at a time when LGBTQ+ rights continue to face challenges around the world.

The collection's structure allows readers to move between intimate realism and speculative imagination. One moment we encounter ordinary domestic lives; the next, we are invited into boldly reimagined futures and unconventional romances. This variety keeps the anthology engaging throughout, although some pieces are so brief that they feel more like sketches than fully realised works. Even so, the overall editorial vision remains coherent, with each contribution adding another facet to the anthology's larger conversation about queer existence.

No anthology can be everything to every reader, and Queerphoria is occasionally uneven. The editors' generosity of spirit, commitment to representation and belief in queer joy as both celebration and resistance make it a valuable collection. It offers a vivid portrait of LGBTQ+ lives in all their complexity, connecting generations, identities and experiences through a shared sense of possibility. In a cultural moment where queer communities continue to defend visibility and belonging, this is to be celebrated.

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