Appearance changes perception, not reality. And this—at the heart of every myth, at the heart of every folk tale—is the truth that must be dressed up in sealskin to make the story heard.
Excerpt from "A Selkie" In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be is an expression of the haunting realities of living queer today, told through the hopeful lens of possibilities for a better future. Audrey's prose poetry are witty, mournful, and joyful—often all at once. Their words invite you to step off the path and into a folk tale knowing that you're not alone. |
The pages of Audrey T. Carroll's In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be are bespeckled with an entrancing array of prose poems that each speak to their own fragment of a queer life. In joyful, and starkly honest, occasionally all at once, this collection parts mournful, possesses a spectacular urgency that carries through its entirety, stunning speechless by the end.
nat raum, author of the abyss is staring back and the fine line Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's collaboration with Tori Amos, "Strange Little Girls," Carroll's introspective, ethereal collection is a defiant raised finger to the popularly-upheld (but utterly absurd) notion that all things sentimental must therefore be trite. In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be overflows with tenderness and wit conveyed through verbal deftness and a semiotician's masterful manipulation of stable signs, symbols, and notions (often destabilising them in turn). What do Ivy and Achelois have in common? Perhaps more than you'd think.
Benjamin D. Muir, author of The McMillan Diaries (kith books, 2024); 2019 AAWP/UWAP Chapter One Prize Winner |