Still Bleeding on the Page: Why Masculinity Needs Dangerous Writing, Not Redemption

'If he finds out that I don’t care for him
or even like him & that I'm only
here because there is nowhere else
he will end me'
– from Nobody

When I started building BOLD, it wasn’t just a poetry anthology about men. It was personal. The idea grew alongside my MA in Popular Culture at Edge Hill University, where I dug into Masculinity Studies and explored how men — especially working-class men — are portrayed in low-status comedy. But I wanted to go deeper than punchlines and pain. I wanted danger. I wanted poetry about masculinity that didn’t flinch. And I wanted readers to feel seen, rattled, even undone.

If you’re looking for powerful poems about masculinity — raw, urgent, and unfiltered — BOLD is where you’ll find them. This isn’t a curated list of emotionally neutered men baring just enough soul to sell self-help books. This is masculinity-themed poetry that spans the full range of identity and experience: queer and straight, cis male and female voices, each interrogating the brutal, tender, confusing performances of what it means to ‘be a man’. These poems are about fatherhood and fear, silence and shame, strength and softness. They’re about male mental health, about gendered expectations, about how we build and break each other.

And if you’re someone who doesn’t usually read poetry—this is your way in. BOLD is real, relatable, and necessary. It’s poetry for people who’ve lived it, not just studied it.

Masculinity’s Current Moment (and Its Limits)

Let’s be honest: the current mainstream conversation around masculinity is… polished. Everyone’s talking about ‘toxic masculinity’, but few are saying anything new. The cultural appetite is there—but only for confessionals with tidy arcs, only for men who speak gently, wrap their trauma in TED Talk packaging, and promise they’ve ‘done the work’. Vulnerability is in vogue, but only when it’s aesthetically pleasing.

What we don’t see enough of is what BOLD gives us: stories that don’t resolve. Emotions that don’t flatter. Men who don’t know how to be, but are trying—sometimes failing—in front of us. This isn’t about redemption. It’s about realism.

My Poem Nobody: Surveillance, Silence, and Surviving the Lads

Nobody is mine, and it came out of a place I didn’t really want to revisit — but had to. It captures something I found over and over again in my research: the unspoken code of working-class masculinity where humour, hostility, and homophobia are interwoven. Where boys become men not through growth, but through endurance.

‘we’re playing Championship Manager
& he tells me his girlfriend’s mother
caught them fucking…’

Formally, the poem uses enjambment and short stanzas to trap the reader in the same suffocating rhythm the speaker is stuck in — trapped by friendship, by performative heterosexuality, by fear. The silence at the core of the poem — never saying what you really feel, never correcting the slur — that is masculinity under pressure. It’s not noble. It’s not self-aware. But it’s honest.

Self-Portrait, For and Against – Fragmented Masculinity in Ferrante’s Firestorm

If Nobody is the internalised voice of masculine fear, Italo Ferrante’s Self-Portrait, For and Against is that voice after it’s broken out of the closet, lit the wardrobe on fire, and danced on the ashes. It’s funny, filthy, furious.

Ferrante rips masculinity apart and stitches it back together using cultural references, pop filth, Catholic guilt, and queer defiance. The poem’s list format acts like a liturgy of identity — a personal canon of wounds and triumphs. The lines pile up like confessions in a booth where God’s left early and the priest’s scrolling Grindr.

Man Strength – Reclaiming the Word ‘Strong’

David Hanlon’s Man Strength doesn’t just redefine masculinity — it rewrites the definition of strength itself. It begins with the gym, where so many men try to chisel masculinity into their bodies. But soon we’re underwater, breath held, suffocating. Then, flowers. Then vulnerability.

‘I know now that real strength
is knowing our
hearts are flowers…’

Hanlon’s strength isn’t performative; it’s tender. The form follows feeling — controlled stanzas, spare punctuation, imagery that oscillates between aggression and softness.

Lunch with Friends – Masculinity as Performance in Public

Ronnie Smith’s Lunch with Friends isn’t about men, directly. But it’s one of the most scathing critiques of masculinity in the book. It’s about a woman watching a man dominate a table — interrupting, boasting, performing like he’s the only one with a mic.

The man’s loudness is violence. The woman’s silence is resistance. Formally, the poem is minimal and precise, resisting the urge to over-explain. It trusts the reader to see what’s happening—and that’s part of its genius.

There Was a Man – Mythologising the Father, Militarising the Son

Matthew M. C. Smith’s poem is soaked in legacy. It’s not just about a father—it’s about a certain kind of man: military, disciplined, silent, strong. But this poem resists hagiography. The speaker grieves through artefacts: medals, photos, the detritus of duty. The form — a long prose-poem — mirrors a rummaging through memory, a refusal to let closure come easily.

‘My father could walk on his hands and do clap press-ups years after his military career…’

The masculinity here is myth, but also mythmaking. It asks: what parts of our fathers do we keep, and which do we burn?

This Is What Dangerous Writing Looks Like

BOLD doesn’t offer solutions. That’s not the point. These poems bleed and bruise and then just… exist. That’s the power. That’s what literature needs now — especially literature about men. Enough of the easy arcs. Give us mess. Give us danger.

Because if men are only allowed to write about themselves when they’re apologising or conforming to a marketable version of softness, we lose the full range of human complexity. And frankly, I’ve seen too much — academically, personally, poetically — to accept anything less.

This anthology is my reckoning. It’s also an invitation.