Canese Jarboe
I have been Queen for ten minutes in the glass cab of a tractor, the control / panel blossoming & blossoming. I don’t remember this / because of the murder-suicide, I remember the murder-suicide because of this
A chronicle of rural childhood and family, a history of queer rodeos, and a paen of magic against death, Sissy opens a field that is both a network of roots and a lyric map.
“Years ago, half of everyone I loved died of AIDS, and these poems hold those spirits in front of me now, vibrating in their light. I love this book. I love it because Canese Jarboe takes seriously the poet’s ancient skills of deep observation to reveal not only what is inside but what is inside the inside. The renegade spirit of these poems turns the book into a portal, pulling us through to a more beautiful world. ‘Here is the gap in the fence / made for your body.’ What we have here is a liberation field guide in our hands!”
—CACONRAD, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“A rural queer manifesto ignited by verse—at times imaginary, at times documentary, SISSY minds the song inside what’s fragrant & what’s flaming. A flagrance of survival in the root & seed & soul & poem. Jarboe archives reckoning, this place & power of return.”
—BRODY PARRISH-CRAIG, author of Boyish
“Belonging, I think, is a thing we build into the world for and with each other, a project Jarboe holds up and makes explicit, in the shimmering field of these poems, in relation to queer and rural lineage, in relation to what can hold what inside of what—exemplified specifically and beautifully by the quilt poems but running through the whole as a continuous stitch. Here, in cinematic glimpses, we are given time and time again a crystalized moment suspended as if in memory’s complex resin and then released back into the physicality of the page, or the liminal space between poem and page, speaker and reader, let into the secret intimacy of the strange. The world here is real; real owls, real needles, real wasps, real people and memories held in bright air, but run through with an elusive current, a loosening of the binds of the expected that lets a certain glitter in. ‘How many others/ are there? In/ their own/ strange haylofts?’ they write, and, wonderfully, ‘these locusts been waiting seventeen years to see me in my nightgown’”
—CODY-ROSE CLEVIDENCE, author of Aux Arc / Trypt Ich
“In SISSY, Canese Jarboe writes and celebrates the miraculous. Half love letter among three queer siblings from a Kansas farm and half docupoetics illuminating the gay rodeo, SISSY goes beyond giving voice to the rural. Jarboe’s lyricism, its taut economy re!ective of what’s afforded the working class, has the opposite effect: a lushness, a continuity from page to page, and generosity of tenderness toward its subjects. Queer cowboys are photographed, are allowed to speak in their own beautiful syntax and vernacular, while Jarboe composes their questions as elevating tribute: ‘Tell me how / you learned to build / anything at all.’ SISSY reminded me how lucky we are to be among, despite. Read this book and feast on a harvest that shouldn’t exist but does.”
—K. IVER, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
Canese Jarboe is a 2024 Tallgrass Artist-in-Residence and the author of the chapbook dark acre (Willow Springs Books, 2018). Jarboe has received fellowships and grants from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Nō Studios and is published in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Southeast Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review and many others. They live in Kansas City, Missouri with their partner.
