Published by House of Anansi (April 2020)
Finalist for the Raymond Souster Award
from the League of Canadian Poets.
What people are saying…
“John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a piercing examination of body, self, and the miraculous yet painful process of becoming. In this emotionally intimate, technically brilliant debut collection, Stintzi both opens a window to their own soul and holds a mirror to the reader's. Quietly powerful, Junebat is the kind of book that one comes back to over and over, to read and to dream about.”
—Kai Cheng Thom, award-winning author of
a place called No Homeland and
I Hope We Choose Love
“John Elizabeth Stintzi’s Junebat is a work of immense gentleness. The care shown toward the authorial self, the past, and those within Stintzi’s emotional sphere is like coming up for air from a culture ruled by nihilism. Case in point: “I am trying to personalize / myself to my melancholy, don’t want to be neighbour / to my own narrative anymore.” To the poetics of the queer everyday Stintzi adds their “Junebat,” a multitudinous concept of such explanatory power I’m certain it’ll endure in the collective memory of Canadian letters. Read this impressive debut!”
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of
This Wound is a World and
NDN Coping Mechanisms
“‘Selections From Junebat’ is a compelling collision of content and form disrupting gender identity and reckoning with the liminal and silent space that such disruption instigates. John Elizabeth Stintzi’s poems rely on the breaking of grammar and syntactical sequences as well as a re-visioning of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ to assert an authentic identity in the speaker’s private and public life. This reckoning and reclamation of self asks readers to consider their own concepts of gender and the difficulties that are faced when gender norms are disrupted. These are brave and timely poems.”
—RBC Bronwen Wallace Award jury citation
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 deep 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 finally emerges from depression, the second wing of the book tracks their falling in love with a woman surfacing from the rubble of her own life following the end of her marriage. Challenging, heartbreaking, soaring, and powerfully new, the poems in Junebat demolish false walls and pull the reader towards 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 metamorphosis.
Press:
“The Chat with John Elizabeth Stintzi” (49th Shelf)
“Reads for the Rest of Us: Feminist Books Coming Out in 2020” (Ms. Magazine)
“Twenty books you need to know about in Spring 2020” (The Toronto Star)
“15 of the Most Anticipated Books by LGBTQ Authors For the First Half of 2020” (LitHub)
Order the collection from:
House of Anansi (CA/USA) (Get the LIMITED HARDCOVER EDITION here, and the broadside of the poem “America (I’m Putting My Queer Shoulder to the Wheel)” here)
Your local community bookstore!
PS: I won’t provide a link to purchase or pre-order it on Am*zon, but I acknowledge that Capitalism has failed us and some may not have the means to buy it elsewhere. Please feel free to support this book through whatever site/resource is most accessible to you!