Queer Hagiographies

FINALIST FOR THE CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE

Here 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 Me

Audra 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 Protection

Look, 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