Skirted

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women’s Studies. The poems in SKIRTED glisten with precise and honest lines that chart how their queer speaker measures and crosses water in all its incarnations. Myth and memory intertwine to reveal the simultaneity of chasm and connection. In this dissonance, the discomfort of being a slowly ripping apart and reforming continent, Wade exposes new lyric heights pushed up from the grit and magma of realizing impeccable geotropic design.

A life in stasis swallowed by the sea, the self skirted in tulle and willow bark, a heart dropped through a hole in the earth to land in joyful queer companionship: this collection is a gorgeous ocean journey of becoming, landing on the complex shores of identity-daughter, thinker, poet, queer-with agency and agility. Wade’s precise poems are gifts, offering insight into how we can glean what we need from the world around us as well as from our own innate knowing. -Tamiko Beyer

The reader is immediately aware of being carried and held in strong, capable hands-able to encompass the necessary roughness of this ride-elated along the way by sparkling, multi-sourced diction and wide ranges of reference, by love poems, sex poems, poems of struggle against intractable gender expectation, and poems of hard sorrow at final breaks, at being cast out, really, once and for all, ‘You are not sure if you are missed.’ On another softer shore: reeled in. -Stephanie Strickland