Featured on Quill & Quire's Fall Preview

If you reloop trauma enough, does it make a danceable rhythm? If you get lost in physical sensation enough, does that make you free?

DADDY is a powerful look at patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire that seeks an unravelling of systems of control to reclaim vulnerability. At once confessional, playful, and sonically meticulous, Byrne's poems seek conversation with a voice in the mind that won't quiet. Cruel father figures dissolve into leather-clad muscle daddies on popper-scented dancefloors; the pain of the past sows the seeds of a joyful exploration of queer desire.

Jake Byrne's profile page

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2's Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.

"I thought I knew desire. I thought I knew raging at the world around, but Jake Byrne shows me the limits of my imagination and fantasy. DADDY is no abstraction. It is, instead, the material cost of living a radical life."
- Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi, author of Daffod*ls and G: Fricatives

"DADDY makes me feel shock and bliss, both at once. It also makes me laugh a lot - but the funny bits actually feel like a mere byproduct of Byrne's incredible understanding of how the world really, truly is."
- Ben Ladouceur, author of I Remember Lights and Mad Long Emotion