Resilience: stories, poems, essays, words for LGBT teens about growing up, surviving, living and thriving.  Ed. by Eric Nguyen. [S.l. : s.n, 2012. Distributed by Lulu.com. 165 p. $16.00.

Sometimes, when the tides of pain and love and injustice are particularly high, artists, poets, and writers are called to create works offering hope and love to those who suffer.  Recently, a rash of suicides of bullied young gay, lesbian, questioning teens has brought the LGBT community together to offer hope and support to other youth living in intolerable situations.   This impetus has created web sites such as the Trevor Project which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth, the It Gets Better project, and the Make It Safe Project  which donates books about sexual orientation and gender expression to schools and youth homeless shelters.

Resilence: Stories, Poems, Essays, Words for LGBT Teens is a collection of 26 works, some previously published.  Proceeds from sales of the book will help fund the Make It Safe Project.  There are stories of coming out, stories of falling in love with another girl, another boy, a story of a transgender man visiting his hometown and telling a young lesbian that it gets better.  There are poems of young boys kissing and being wrenched apart, of rage bubbling up beneath a diagnosis of AIDS, of reclaiming one’s place in the South.  There are two plays, one for three men and the other a family drama of a girl, her mother and father.  Another work explores two women’s long-term exchange of letters, beginning when they were respectively 20 and 13.  As with any anthology, some pieces are stronger than others, but none weaken the collection.

However, this is a self-published anthology.  The collection’s strengths include not only the quality of the content, but also the feel of the paper, the colorful and intriguing cover art, and the balance of text to white space on the pages.  The problems occur more from lack of publishing experience than from a lack of talent.  There is no introductory statement about the scope of the book.  The works are obviously not all memoir nor all fiction, but it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which.  One piece, written in the first person voice of a young gay man, is by an author whose biographical information indicates that she is married to a man and has two children.  While it is not inconceivable that a gay male-identified teen might become a married woman, it seems unlikely—yet, there is no indication that the story is fictional.  Information on the author of another story was not included in the brief biographies.  An experienced editor would have made sure that biographical notes on all the authors were included.  That lack of experience is one of the weaknesses Resilience shares with many self-published works.  I hope that future editions of this collection will have corrected these oversights.

Despite the few editorial problems, I recommend this book for high school, public, and undergraduate library reading collections.

Reviewed by Jane Cothron, Cataloger

Lincoln County  Library District (OR)