• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to "lovers, friends and in-betweens," Eli Tareq Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is the author of knot body (2020, Metatron Press), which was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and The Good Arabs (2021, Metonymy Press). Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. They are an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press, as well as an editor at smoke and mold and the non-fiction editor at The Puritan.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch's profile page

• Short-listed, QWF - First Book Prize

“For me, the power of knot body stems from its courage and unique voice in writing the ache, the ache of chronic pain, the ache of faulty diagnoses and bodily misreadings, and, equally, the ache for honest answers on “how to love each other in all our dignity.” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an artist and philosopher of talent, generosity, and heart.”
—DAVID CHARIANDY, AUTHOR OF BROTHER

“In this moment, when trans, racialized and disabled bodies are met with violent and polarizing commentary within the the public sphere, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch offers us the uninterrupted intimacy of knot body. As self-communional as Kiese Laymon’s Heavy and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, they amplify and queer the epistolary memoir genre. Each letter is emotionally and thematically complete and, too, each letter decidedly speaks to the next. Readers may ruminate on the sharp and sensual inquiry offered by each individual letter, or read cover-to-cover and be present to the gorgeously-engaged, call-and-response quality of knot body as a whole.”
—AMBER DAWN, AUTHOR OF MY ART IS KILLING ME

“knot body is such a generous tapestry of tenderness—a collection that brilliantly utilizes the direct address in a way that is not universal, but still beautifully communal. I reached the end of this collection and breathed in a newer, better world.”
—HANIF ABDURRAQIB, AUTHOR OF A FORTUNE FOR YOUR DISASTER