Inbetweenland
Part love song, part howl, part incantation, Inbetweenland is the first book-length collection of Jacks McNamara’s poems, prose, and hybrid experiments in the neon vernacular of being alive.
Published by Deviant Type Press in March 2013.
Please support an independent artist and order a copy of Inbetweenland directly from me here.
You can also order my book directly from its distributor, AK Press, or through the big corporate outlets like Amazon.
Full book description: Mapping out radical trajectories through loss, violence, and queer desire, McNamara creates a luminous archive of survival and resilience in a self-destructing world. A visual artist as well as a writer, the author relies heavily on the unexpected image to chronicle the impossible journey through body, family, and history–towards home. From the borderlands of madness to the unpredictable shape of peace, Inbetweenland bears unflinching witness to a rarely charted geography, offering the reader a resonant poetics of insurrection and grace.
Praise for Inbetweenland
"Jacks McNamara looks at a lemon tree, the eyes of a lover, a dying parent, and sees the world. Acute observation and eloquent language draw the reader close so the emotional core of the poems is irresistibly naked against our skin.” -Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories
"Jacks’ poetry reminds me of what it really means to heal in the fierce, delicious, messy, ‘tendercomplex’ way that queer survivors breathe in our bones every day. Their words stitch a quilt full of fisting, fighting, glitter, and all our secret landscapes and escape routes. This is a fierce, fierce music. A prayer and a promise, taking us home.” -Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2012 Lambda Award winner, author of Love Cake, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home
“Where is home, when you do not belong where you begin? When land is stolen and the diaspora is not yours to claim? How do we survive to write our lives- lives that have been erased or not yet written? Poet and activist Jacks McNamara knows that the questions are more important than the answers, and their debut collection leaves us with so many beautiful, dangerous, and brave new ways of asking.” -Leah Horlick, author of Riot Lung