Even, by K. Ann MacNeil

Poetry, chapbook, 16 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Even is a series of nine short poems. The collection is a meditation on possibilities and limitations of what it means to archive via a queer catalog of imagined exes, ex-exes, and ex-ex-exes. The vignettes, individually, and as a collection, seek to map and to engage constructions of whiteness, queerness, femme-ness, and working class identities, categories that (often, still) remain unmarked, misread, and/or covered up, particularly when considered together. The vignettes center a set of (white, working poor) queer femme sensibilities, economies, and histories.

Written and rewritten over a decade, the vignettes play with notions of temporality, what we know, when we know, and how we know that we know a thing. Titular words can function as more than one part of speech and offer layered, shifting and shifted meanings. Understandings of linearity and that which we imagine to be understood in any given moment function, like desire, as at once mutable and persistent.

K. Ann MacNeil lives and teaches where the Harlem and Hudson Rivers meet in northern Manhattan and on the Atlantic in southern Maine. Her most recent work appears in This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching; The Still Blue Project: Writing with Working Class Queers in Mind; Love, Always: Partners of Trans People on Intimacy, Challenge, and Resilience; Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear; and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. Salt, a mini-collection of micro-poems, has been published by Rinky Dink Press. She loves that her grown daughter visits so regularly.