JAX CONNELLY

ABOUT THE BOOK

Jax Connelly’s debut prose collection, a memoir in essays and experiments, subverts traditional nonfiction expectations by queering form, theme, and genre. Some of these essays are straightforward, juxtaposing quiet scenes from mundane aftermaths: breaking up, turning thirty. And some are disruptive, disrupted, enlisting elements like erasure, white space, and run-on sentences to construct a reading experience representative of something ineffable: liminal queer intimacies and unresolved familial wounds, the shifting facts of a dysphoric body over time. Eroding boundaries between longing and belonging, dark moods and dark humor, big ideas and ordinary observations, these fifteen essays dip in and out of subjects ranging from food waste and black holes to high-school softball and a rescue dog who won’t eat. The result is a reckoning with the fallibility of memory, “truth” in its slipperiest forms, and the “I”-making stories we tell about our pasts in order to survive them.

ABOUT QUILL

Queer literature is often found in the side stacks, in the back of the bookstore, under "Gay and Lesbian." These authors are put into a genre that barely fits them, excluded from mainstream funding, and alienated by submission questionnaires and prying questions about identity and the underlying, "What are you?" The contradiction is that though labels can be alienating, they can also be empowering and community building. Red Hen Press seeks to work against the negative politics of labeling while honoring and empowering authors who identify as queer. Learn more