Junebat

Poems

New!

From award-winning author John Elizabeth Stintzi, Junebat is a form- and gender-disrupting debut collection that grapples with the pain of uncertainty on the path towards becoming.

John Elizabeth Stintzi’s unforgettable debut collection, Junebat, grapples with the pain of uncertainty on the path towards becoming. Set during the year Stintzi lived in deep isolation in Jersey City, NJ, these poems map the depression the poet struggled with as they questioned and came to grips with their gender identity. Through the invention of the Junebat — a contradictory, evolving, ever-perplexing creature — Stintzi is able to create a self-defined space within the poems where they can reside comfortably, beyond the firm boundaries of the gender binary or the plethora of identities gathered under the queer umbrella.

As the speaker of the poems begins to emerge from their depression, the second wing of the book tracks their falling in love with a young woman surfacing from the end of her marriage. Challenging, heartbreaking, soaring, and powerfully new, the poems in Junebat demolish false walls and pull the reader to the dark edges of the mind, showing us how identity doesn’t have to be rigid or static but can be defined by confusion and contradiction, possibility and a metamorphosis that never ends.

Contributors

John Elizabeth Stintzi

JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZI is a non-binary poet and novelist who was raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. They are the winner of the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize, and their work can be found in the Malahat Review, PRISM International, Kenyon Review Online, and Ploughshares. They are the author of the novel Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp Press), as well as two previous chapbooks of poetry. They currently live and work in the United States.

Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

Preview

Origa/me – To Be Beside Oneself – Selected Definitions of Junebat – Toward Hoboken Station (September 30, 2016) – Salutations from the Storm – To a Sub-Hudson … 33 $3.30

Preview

Apophatic Junebat – Metamorphose – Cataphatic Junebat 11 $1.10

Preview

The Night After Flights of Cider – Get Lucky? – Evidence Disproving the Existence of a Junebat – New World Blackbirds – Rorschach Junebat – America (I’m … 35 $3.50