Post-Eclipse: A Queer Home, by Jo Christian

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Written from the heart of Southern Illinois, at the eclipse crossroads of America, following the second path of totality directly through the town of Carbondale, the chapbook Post-Eclipse: A Queer Home creates a mythos and gender-queer, cryptid journey from hiding in the dense, closeted woods of Shawnee National Forest to the top of the world, seeing the folk legend of the Big Muddy Monster waiting for their companion, atop the smiling face of the Makanda water tower.

In the end, you find yourself entrenched in the strange, mystical world that is Southern Illinois, its myths and ways of relating to itself. You find yourself challenged by the queer possibility of understanding the divine, the world, and even a pile of dead skins cells on wooded floors as belonging. And just like other queer community members, writers, artists, and the neurodivergent, we find ourselves oddly at home in the strangeness of it all, home and in love with our place in it all.

Jo Christian (they/them) is a Ph.D. student at Southern Illinois University. They are also a nonbinary bread baker and poet. Their work has appeared in Vita Poetica, Transom, Gulf Stream, on the University and College Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets page, and others. They have received their MFA from SIUC and their MA from the University of Louisville.