Our first book of 2021, Skirted by Julie Marie Wade, will launch this March in three virtual readings shared with Denise Duhamel, who will read from her new collection, Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press, March 2021). The event at Books and Books is the official Miami launch with Q&A to follow.Wednesday, March 10th at 7:30 PM EST, Wild and Precious Life Series
Sunday, March 28th at 4 PM EST, Books and Books
Tuesday, April 13th at 7:30 PM EST, South Florida Poetry Journal
Rajiv Mohabir says, “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.’ The oceans and lakes of this collection will teach you how to eat fire and snowsquall, how to thrive while wading the heartwaters, how to bear living.”
Stephanie Strickland adds, “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.”
Julie Marie Wade’s previous collections include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures; Small Fires: Essays; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems; When I Was Straight; SIX; Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems; and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing.
With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus.