Description: "A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon's debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety-wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves"--
Brief description: Jennifer Conlon is from North Carolina and lives in Tempe, Arizona, where they teach at Arizona State University. Their poems have been published by Bayou Magazine, Juked, Bennington Review, DIALOGIST, Threadcount, and elsewhere. Taking to Water is their first book.
Review Quotes:
". . . honest, intelligent, and thoughtful. It's easy to see why Taking to Water won the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and why folks will want to read it more than once." --Washington Independent Review of Books
"Taking to Water is a startling, necessary collection; what Conlon says about gender's spectrum can also be said for this book: 'it will move across you do not be afraid.'" --Carl Phillips, author of Then the War: And Selected Poems
"Jennifer Conlon's Taking to Water is the most transformative collection of poems I've read. . . . Conlon has given us a sharper, better lyric to inhabit and demand the world with." --C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking