Skirted

by Julie Marie Wade

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. The poems in SKIRTED glisten with precise and honest lines that chart how their queer speaker measures and crosses water in all its incarnations. Myth and memory intertwine to reveal the simultaneity of chasm and connection. In this dissonance, the discomfort of being a slowly ripping apart and reforming continent, Wade exposes new lyric heights pushed up from the grit and magma of realizing "impeccable geotropic design."
"A life in stasis swallowed by the sea, the self skirted in tulle and willow bark, a heart dropped through a hole in the earth to land in joyful queer this collection is a gorgeous ocean journey of becoming, landing on the complex shores of identity-daughter, thinker, poet, queer-with agency and agility. Wade's precise poems are gifts, offering insight into how we can glean what we need from the world around us as well as from our own innate knowing."-Tamiko Beyer
"The reader is immediately aware of being carried and held in strong, capable hands-able to encompass the necessary roughness of this ride-elated along the way by sparkling, multi-sourced diction and wide ranges of reference, by love poems, sex poems, poems of struggle against intractable gender expectation, and poems of hard sorrow at final breaks, at being cast out, really, once and for all, 'You are not sure if you are missed.' On another softer reeled in."-Stephanie Strickland

94 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry (2004), the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize (2004), the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes (2006, 2010), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), an Al Smith Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize (2012), a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund (2012), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations. Julie is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011); two collections of poetry, Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013); the creative nonfiction chapbook Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Press, 2013); and the forthcoming When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014). She lives with her partner Angie Griffin in the Sunshine State and teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Reviews

[hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time, I was in a poetry class in college. We covered a poem featured in this book, as it had won an award for the school poetry review. I loved that poem with everything in me and memorized it to do a performance of it in class. I liked it so much that I kept the book it was published in explicitly for that poem, and sometimes as my life meandered onward I would sit there and read it aloud.

I have moved since then. I have moved a lot. In my most recent move, I realized I had misplaced the old poetry review, and I was deeply upset because I had no idea where I would find the poem anymore. Something that felt so confined to one class surely wouldn't be easy to find again, would it?

Some furious googling later, I found that Skirted contained a copy of the poem, and I scrounged together a few pennies to buy it immediately. On a hot summer afternoon, bathed in sun from windows we haven't been able to hang curtains over, I read this book from cover to cover.

Julie Marie Wade, if you're reading this, Source Amnesia has been a cornerstone of my poetic experience for years. Thank you for that.