Max Delsohn

Crawl

(Graywolf Press, Oct. 21)

I met Max Delsohn when they watched the door at Hugo House. But it was the original Hugo House. The filthy, perfect, tiny old house with a stage and a bar and offices upstairs and disgusting carpet and books and people who read and wrote them, in and out, always. This is the Seattle of Delsohn’s Crawl, a dare I say perfect, albeit unsuspecting, series of stories about trans, queer Seattle in the 2010s. In these tales, we go on a sad and lonely trek through Seattle’s gay bar scene with a trans narrator exploring his new interest in men. We watch straights nearly ruin Pride Sunday by showing up at Dykiki (Denny Blaine’s most queer beach), and we spend a day at Cal Anderson with a narrator who wanders in and out of queer dramas, LSD highs, and Fireball lows. It’s been a long time since we received such a glorious, accurate, gay, grimy, hilarious, embarrassing celebration of our city. This book is a gift. 

Michelle Peñaloza

All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems

(Persea Books, Sept. 16)

Another poet and great Seattleite (currently living in California), Peñaloza rises again with a collection that takes on colonization in the US from a new angle, and presents a personal and historical Filipinx narrative in her distinctive and resonant voice. Through words remembered from childhood—ganda, lungkot, kahirapan, puso, buhay, ginto—with English definitions, or conjured in a US context; through stories of dis/alignment with her mother, her family; through creation of her own record of experience, including multimedia collage by her own hand, Peñaloza constructs her own archive of identity, denying erasures, confronting violences faced in the body/family/nation, and defining Filipinx mother-daughter love and tensions and pains. Her language, rhythm, and narrative tension will keep you rapt, and her wisdom will satiate you. Don’t miss her Seattle release party at Common Area Maintenance on September 17 with Bill Carty, Jane Wong, Quenton Baker, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Tessa Hulls, Matthew Schnirman, and Angela Garbes. 

Myriam Gurba

Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

(Timber Press, Oct. 21) 

Cuyama. Erythea. Azquiles. Huitlacoche. Bull clover. Every page or two of Poppy State, Myriam Gurba will offer you a word that portals into a world you’ve never met before. I read this book on a camping trip in which twin teens kept asking me, What’s that book about? I kept saying: California, coming into yourself, ecology. But they were right, that doesn’t cover it. It’s about getting lost. It’s about this narrator’s experience with patriarchal gender violence, domestic and otherwise, and how that terror scares the soul right out of her, makes of her bitter fruit. This book allows the reader to become lost in her many histories, but especially her personal and Indigenous histories, and to learn a relationship with plants you have surely not encountered before. In these new relationships, we’re shown a way to reclaim ourselves after unfathomable injustice and abuse, and I swear, we have lols all along the way. Myriam Gurba is an artist in the purest sense, and this offering will show you a new way to see the world and your relationship to it. 

Catherine Corbett Bresner

Can We Anything We See 

(Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, Aug. 26)

Catherine Corbett Bresner may live in a small town in Vermont these days, but we celebrate them as if they were still in Seattle with us. Some poet words used to describe this 86-page poem: a new mode of ekphrasis; lines as captions or ciphers; caesuras of breath and contemplation. I’m not a poet, nor any expert in poetry, but this poem brought me immediate relief. It’s one I’ll return to again and again as we sink deeper into the muck of AI and all its intentional and unintentional confusion and surrealities. Can We Anything We See was technically published in February, but Bresner is touring it this fall, so don’t miss the Seattle release at Elliott Bay Books on September 6 with fellow poets Patrick Milian, Sarah Mangold, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Terry Dactyl

(Coffee House Press, Nov. 11)

We have an icon in our midst, and her name is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, walking the parks and streets of Capitol Hill like a goddess among us, imparting humor and stories at a prolific pace. Terry Dactyl is her latest, a novel named for its protagonist, who is raised by lesbian mothers in Seattle in the 1980s before moving to New York City as the AIDS crisis quiets and slows. We watch her come of age as a trans woman, tackle the prestigious art world of New York, then return to her home city in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, where she seeks community and connection in a Seattle claimed by tech and greed. How does she find her way through? Sycamore gives us a story of resilience and resistance unique to this place we call home. Read this one, along with her entire oeuvre. 

Ally Ang

Let the Moon Wobble

(Alice James Books, Nov. 11)

This year is a big one for our local writer heroes. Ally Ang is another queer, trans heavy hitter with an NEA grant and a MacDowell fellowship in their back pocket. Bolstered by this training and recognition, Ang swung big with this debut. Let the Moon Wobble, with cover art from Katherine Bradford—inspired by the exhibit Ang caught at the Frye—is filled with poems that, like Sycamore’s Terry Dactyl, traverse the COVID-19 pandemic, but also tackle the climate crisis and the rise of fascism. This debut does not begin this writer’s career modestly, or on a small scale. Like their Seattle contemporaries, Ang blends humor and absurdity with grief and rage, and as a writer of color, tells on the systems and institutions functioning to repress and kill queer people of color. Ang seeks hope and freedom in these pages and, also like Sycamore’s novel, reaches into their community for the fuel they need to keep going. 

Look for full interviews with many of these authors in The Stranger in print and online, coming soon.