Synopsis "Queer Hagiographies"
FINALIST FOR THE CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZEHere are the saints as you’ve never seen them: creative, lustful, victorious. After performing miracles, St. Hilda returns to a domestic life with another woman. St. Francis Xavier, thinking about St. Ignatius Loyola, recalls their sacred moments of intimacy. Audra Puchalski conjures the martyred body—“resonant/ as the skirt of the bell in the steeple”—with imagination, respect, wisdom.—Robin Becker, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize and author of The Black Bear Inside MeAudra Puchalski is a color theorist disguised as a poet, overlaying sensory hues in defiance of any notion of a primary queer experience. She is playful and studious in turns as all great observers of the sky must be. In Queer Hagiographies, someone is always climbing up to get a better view. The landscape is historical and histrionic: the women collapse in unison. A queer body (are all primary bodies queer and altered by value?) is ripped apart and resembled reverently by Puchalski: a virgin statue shattered, diamond-studded thousand-pound collar, a fainting maiden hair fern. There is no one else who writes like this because there is no one else who has the eyes to see, the palette, and the light.—Gala Mukomolova, author of Without ProtectionLook, I don't know what a saint is, but having read Queer Hagiographies I now know that we are most alive, perhaps, when martyred, snake fed to snake, lyric. These poems confirm how queer this shit has been this whole fucking time: queer and unbelievably detailed, queer and exclamatory, queer and swollen at its leafy nodes. Read this if you're like: who's the best at line breaks, and how can I be more than a little bit turned on by things I've never considered erotic, and what is time, who am I.—Hannah Ensor, author of Love Dream With Television
