Books
"God, dear I want you to be more like me, I want you down here weeping."
In Back Of Heaven reappropriates biblical symbols to explore queerness, grief, religious trauma and sexuality. Through the burning of these iconographies, the poems here emerge to take on the role of a new queer gospel: invoking the ritual of sex, the transfiguration of body into animal, the profane and the sacred rites of desire, to the ultimate act of self-reinvention from trauma, these poems are a roadmap through the shadows of a Catholic upbringing. In Back of Heaven is a litany for survival, a scripture of acceptance, a prayer for queer freedom.
Frances is a memoir told in brief semi-hallucinatory poetic vignettes. The text takes on the form of traumatic memory; coming out in fragmented, disoriented chunks reminiscent of attempting to take a breath during a panic attack. Frances is an exploration of trauma and grief as characters and of queer love as salve. Frances is a prism of adolescent trauma, a document of self-bisection. In this way, Frances is an anti-memoir. It is an unraveling.
Rory Langford is in a downward spiral. After losing his father to suicide, he is cut adrift from a family he has always been at odds with: an older sister who has never understood him, and a grieving mother who can’t even bear the sight of him.
In the wake of tragedy, he staggers from soulless university classrooms to the bar as he turns to spirits to drown his guilty conscience. But when he can no longer harbour a family secret that threatens to swallow him alive, he is plunged headfirst into a whiskey-fuelled existential crisis like no other. On the brink of total collapse, he finds himself fist-fighting frat boys, shitting on the floor of a drunk tank, sleeping in graveyards and encountering a cast of characters including a doomed ex-con, an old friend with a weird fixation on the writings of Karl Marx and a woman whose present reminds Rory too much of his past.
Equal parts punk rock paean and Shakespearean tragedy, Dropping Out is a blistering portrait of addiction and self-immolation.
