Composed in two halves, Erica Gillingham's The Human Body is a Hive is a playful and observant reconception of queer love and queer family-making. Opening with a shameless celebration of sex and desire, the collection expands the boundaries of love to include friendship, romance, and lifelong partnership. The latter catalogues the cyclical heartbreaks and wonders of fertility treatment through the microscopic lenses of nature, medicine, and art. Both quietly moving and profoundly celebratory, this exciting debut evokes tenderness and resilience.

Erica Gillingham is a queer poet & writer living in London, England, via Siskiyou County, California. She is a bookseller at Gay's The Word bookshop, Books Editor for DIVA, and Poetry Editor for The Signal House Edition. Erica has a PhD in lesbian love stories in young adult literature. Her poems have been published by Cipher Press and Pilot Press as well as Impossible Archetype, Untitled: Writing and other journals, and she has an essay in Queer Love, Queer Life (Muswell Press, November 2021).