WE ARE CHANGED TO DEER AT THE BROKEN PLACE

Aromantic, Asexual, Aroace. This collection considers what it means to be a queer nonbinary daughter in search of mother and myth as refuges. Inhabiting and breaking inherited forms like the sonnet, the speaker rewrites mythology to find new possibilities of queer transformation within inherited traditions--in which bodies not only change to trees and deer to escape the cishet male gaze, but also break the gaze itself. Intimate lyrics chart the interior landscape of the speaker's asexuality and aromanticism and explore the queered nuances of body and of platonic friendships. In the process, the book explores the mother wound of how these myths are inherited and what it means to create a new story, a new vocabulary, a new kind of breaking. "This book is stunning, like nothing else, and so sure of its experience that it won't be bullied or twisted into submitting to norms: of hetero, of couple, of labor. Every poem feels original, unsettling, starkly refusing to bend to the cishet world's will."--Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Doll Studies: Forensics Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.