I Feel That Way Too is up for giveaway until the end of October.

Head over to our giveaways page for your chance to win, and to check out everything else we have on offer. 

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Once, while camping at a Radical Faerie sanctuary—a land project dedicated to queer secular spirituality—I lay down before an enormous altar dedicated to the innumerable queers who came here for hospice and burial during the AIDS crisis. Their bones and ashes are embedded in the land, their photos and stories decorate this lofty altar. Laying on my back, gazing up at the ceiling decor, one art piece stood out amidst the visual cacophony: a simple piece of brightly-coloured construction paper, with the word GRIEVE written in big block letters, the squared-off shapes filled with glitter. Grieve, but make it fabulous. Drag, not a drag. Which isn’t to say, lie about it, or miscommunicate it, or ignore it, but remain open to the inevitable beauty that exists in the intimacy of loss, in the carnal experience of death, the delicacy of a room full of queer archival images and stories. There is life there, a delicious pulsing still. Grieve, baby, grieve.

I Feel That Way Too had a lot of impulses and goals, but the main one was to critically look at how the media coverage of #MeToo impacts survivors. A broader way to say this is that it’s a look at how pain, grief, and recovery are not just internal, personal experiences: they’re embedded in the systems around us, which in turn feed back into our own nervous systems. All the books below dance within this interplay of the grief within and around us.

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Whatever Gets You Through, edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee

While writing I Feel That Way Too, I read a lot of other media focused on sexual assault stories. My concern was, how do I write about this topic without passing along the trauma to my reader? This collection of essays—situated right in the #MeToo era—offered many approaches to its topic, and taught me that craft is an invaluable tool for creating some emotional distance without losing any precision or poignancy. In fact, discussing violence through the metaphor of a goose might even offer more precision, because the focus on vibes rather than literal storytelling allows the reader to connect with emotions over facts. 

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it was never going to be okay, by jaye simpson

The debut collection from poet and performer jaye simpson showcases a broad assemblage of images, textures, tastes, dialogue, hopes and fears to reflect on the inheritances of oppressive social structures (in this case, the colonial foster care system). Stories from the speaker’s youth pop up as tactile memories, and are punctuated by critical analyses—poems redefine the world, making it make sense within internal narratives. Linguistic rhythms and finely articulated images evoke sensations in the body, giving a somatic reading experience. 

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Where Things Touch, by Bahar Orang

This meditation on poetry, science, bodies, and intimacy bring the detailed precision of med school to a study of beauty. The collection slides from fragment to fragment, giving the feeling of a conscientious student’s notebook: questions, reflections, clips of poems, memories from the morning after, and bookish notes weave together to build a devotional tapestry, a personal textbook, a taxonomy of pleasure and self-knowledge.

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Dunk Tank, by Kayla Czaga

Image-ridden, sentences dancing through an agility course of craft, Kayla Czaga’s second poetry collection almost feels like a birthing. A teenage speaker’s storytelling straddles fable and reality, using metaphors so unusual that they almost feel mystical to both soften and brighten the harsh or mundane realities of adulthood. Strange combinations of words make more sense in your heart than they do in your brain (“You ate a cloud and felt cold for sixteen years”).

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Quivering Land, by Roewan Crowe

An artful queer western, written years before queer culture embraced country aesthetic. Roewan Crowe’s literary debut was the first verse novel I ever read. The combination of poems, narrative, and visual art struck me with a long lasting curiosity about what literature could be. The unique form of Quivering Land tackles colonial landscapes, feminized bodies, and topographies of force and recovery. 

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Swans, by Michelle Brown

Reading a verse novel is like watching an art house film: it is meant to be felt, not understood. This fable-like, coming-of-age collection feels like dancing, as it moves the reader through scenes of girlhood, friendship, survival-as-getting-older, and dog-walking as therapy. It made me wonder, are all coming-of-age stories inherently fable-like?

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Oubliette, by Hannah Godfrey

Something I really admire about Hannah Godfrey’s writing is her range: each of her books is distinctly unlike the previous. Sometimes she’s writing poems, essays, elaborate story systems or spritely fables. Oubliette, a fragmented collection from the British-Canadian poet, art critic, curator and fable-writer, is an archive of the memories that surface during grieving. Words draw lines around small moments, quippy conversation, things mom used to say—“enjoy it and leave it all behind.” Sometimes, quotes from other authors pop in to contextualize, plug cultural relationships into the very personal and yet entirely universal experience of loss. 

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Pray For Us Girls, by Cara Nelissen

In Nelissen’s debut chapbook, prose poems pull together threads from a narrative of loss and grief, facts about crows, intimacy, and transformation. Her deft lyricism makes the mundane sparkle with romantic possibility. These poems taught me the true charm of animal facts. 

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Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

This story is another champion in the club of writing about trauma without transmitting trauma. In this fictionalized version of a real-enough story, the women of a Mennonite colony debate theology, duty, and action to be taken after uncovering the truth behind mass intra-community sexual violence. It was made into a film and screened at major film festivals, so maybe you’ve already seen it by now. If you’re wondering, the book is just as good as the movie.

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I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World, by Kai Cheng Thom

In this collection of essays and poems, Kai Cheng Thom walks the fine line between pain and care. Focusing on community—queer social justice community—she fearlessly acknowledges the dying nature of the world and looks to what’s next in the natural cycle of decay and growth, and lovingly criticizes the impulses we feel when facing difficulty: “communities truly punish only those whom it can do without,” she warns. While the essays traverse many topics, one specifically focuses on echoes of the #MeToo movement, asking what does it mean when an entire community is frozen in a trauma response? “We have to be able to care, even when it seems impossible...” 

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Learn more about I Feel That Way Too: 

A critical response to the #MeToo movement, I Feel That Way Too is an experiment in narrative poetics. It weaves through past and present, drawing together art, philosophy, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and childhood memory to interrogate how media and social power structures sustain patriarchal ideologies. Inspired by the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Anne Carson, A.M. O’Malley and Isobel O’Hare, these poems are lyrical and meditative, moving to make sense of the nervous system in battle and in recovery.