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Jamie Townsend : SHADE
Jamie Townsend's SHADE attends to 'lust, lost, friendship' with a rich, expressive desire for the 'solidarity of raw physical closeness,' for something 'beyond subjectivity.' These poems—at turns dark, disjunctive, fluid, and expansive—know the complicity and power in wanting, and also the necessity in insisting on personal longing and emotional life. This book is an effervescent and urgent soundtrack to the struggle towards “a new life in honey after rent.”—Alli Warren

Jamie Townsend's SHADE is all torn pop-culture ligaments and mediated flesh, like early Cronenberg movies where the body itself is “the not the body.” Activated and made real by pop songs like Lionel Ritchie's “All Night Long,” and song-Events like Antony's cover of “Crazy in Love,” flesh is now really and only “the way we move tonight."—Masha Tupitsyn

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Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as the long-form collection SHADE (Elis Press, 2015), and SEX MACHINES (speCt Books, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.