Description:
The Only Way Out is Through chronicles queer heartbreak and yearning.
Brief description: KATIE JEAN SHINKLE's books and chapbooks include The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays (YesYes Books, 2026), Transference (Gasher Press, 2025), and Tannery Bay (coauthored with Steven Dunn, FC2, 2024). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Awarded fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary and Ragdale, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.
Review Quotes:
Katie Jean Shinkle's The Only Way Out Is Through is a contemplation on 'ghost-time, ' the pasts we erase, but which remain nonetheless, which persist. It tells a story of a breakup, or rather a story of multiple breakages, severances between / within self and other, intimacy, love, care-a story that repeatedly opens and closes on the possibility of change, of renewal, much like the process of living itself."
-thirii myo kyaw myint, Names for Light: A Family History
"The writing in The Only Way Out Is Through is exquisitely crafted; full of ruination, clutter, addiction, disarray, shame, destruction, but most importantly growth-the untangling of the endings of one space and the beginnings that remain."
-luna rey hall, loudest when startled
"What does it mean to want to change when you feel chained to your insatiable desires? Shinkle's adept ability to dig open the wounds of addiction (and the fear of attempting recovery) is singular. The Only Way Out Is Through will make you question the gin-soaked American mythos surrounding the arts and allow us to heal, to imagine the possibilities of life when one grants the self permission to want more, to love better."
-min kang, darkly + completely