I am thrilled and honoured that The Garbage Poems is a finalist for the Lamba Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry! Poems made out of re-arranged garbage words might sound fun and playful, and they are. Primarily this is a book about joy—swimming joy, embodied joy, queer joy, chronically ill and disabled joy. But it’s about the kind of joy that can’t afford to wait for things to be okay first, the kind of joy I’ve learned to lean into when things are at their hardest. Joy despite, and in the midst of, and for the sake of survival. So there’s also a lot of vulnerable backstory in the book about my history with chronic illness and head injury and depression, mixed in with the skinny dipping and pleasure and talk of the lesbionic hand of god.

And what wonderful books to be in company with on these shortlists! In the world of poetry, I’m especially excited for Non-Prophet by Qurat Dar, who I read with at a book launch last fall in Toronto that moved me to tears, a body more tolerable by jaye simpson, who I got to hear at another magical launch in Toronto last year, and antibody by Rebecca Salazar which I have been so excited to finish ever since Kim Fahner told me about it when I visited her on a road trip with my friend Kathy last summer. I’m also excited for milktooth by Jaime Burnet, which I haven’t read yet but looks amazing and is getting such great reviews. And also on my must-read list is Look Ma, No Hands by Gabrielle Drolet. There are many other great titles I’ve read or am looking forward to reading from the other side of the border too (queer romance is my jam in stressful times so, yes, I’ve read several of those titles already), but it’s particularly exciting to see finalists whose work I know or who are published by small Canadian presses.

A huge congratulations to everyone on these lists, and to all the equally amazing queer and trans books that came out this year. So many of my absolute dearest books of the year aren’t on these lists—how could they all be?—but I’m so glad they exist and they have made my life materially better over the last year. The disasters of the world seem to be piling up at an ever-increasing speed, and it feels complicated to lean into enjoying something like this, but I think we also need queer joy more than ever. As I sat in the provincial archives on Wednesday afternoon with my friend Mado, on a break from a co-writing session and obsessively refreshing Instagram to watch as finalists were announced for each category, it was so good to feel a little moment of feral queer joy in the room for every new set of finalists as they appeared on our tiny screens.