Description
Debut chapbook on queerness and the body from luna rey hall author of loudest when startled (Yes Yes Books 2022)
SPACE NEON NEON SPACE is a striking collection on the body. luna’s voice is strong & momentous, and explores language with movement that will give you shivers!
“The space between these pages is bright and dripping with neon. luna rey hall’s collection SPACE NEON NEON SPACE is a love letter to a breaking body. In this book, gender is transformed and painted in the brightest lavender, and the speaker must learn to escape the societal violence of labeling anything they fear enough to try and contain. hall is unafraid of fighting back, writing ‘…call me torrent, / downpour/ i snip…’ This collection is a monsoon, flooding our expectations of gender. May no man in charge of our laws find peace in these pages; they were always meant to drown.” —Jason B. Crawford
“luna rey hall’s poems are complex refusals: of expectation; of gender performance; of binary ways of thinking, knowing, and being. At the same time, they are rife with seemingly binary contradiction: light in the darkest depths of the ocean, velvet on antlers, violence and love. Seemingly, because none of these things, hall expertly shows us, are actually contradictory at all. In this collection, hall wrestles with the self that both is and is not the body, working through the reality of queer pain while actively demanding narratives that detail its opposite: ‘a queer-ass story, / with queer-ass characters, / in a queer ass setting…/ & there ain’t a hint of trauma.’ These are poems of radical becoming. At every turn, hall resists who and how their loved ones want them to be, refusing to write ‘poems that make someone say son’ and instead asking complicated questions—what does it mean to transition if your loved ones still dream you didn’t? how does one define the self in the absence of language, or when the language available is inadequate?—that have no easy answers, only queer ones. hall’s poems challenge us, implicitly and visually, to sit in the spaces that uncertainty—which is really possibility—makes; to look at gender and sexuality like the water that permeates this glittering collection: a boundless, beautiful paradox, capable of occupying any and every shape.” —Raye Hendrix
Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies
Author Bio
luna rey hall is a queer non-binary writer. they are the author of no matter the diagnosis (Game Over Books, 2023), the patient routine (Brigids Gate Press, 2023), and loudest when startled (YesYes Books, 2020), longlisted for the 2020 Julie Suk Award. they are the winner of the 2013 Patsy Lea Core in Memorial Award for Poetry. their poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus, and Raleigh Review, among others. they live in St. Paul, MN.
Author City: SAINT PAUL, MN USA