A powerful follow-up to the Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisted sulphurtongue.

antibody is a protest, a whisper network, a reclamation of agency, and a ritual for building a survivable world.

antibody mobilizes body horror as resistance, refusing to sanitize the atrocities of sexual violence or to silence its survivors. Challenging myths of “perfect” victimhood, this collection honours the messy, rageful, queer, witchy, disabled, and kinky grief work of enduring trauma and learning to want to live.

if we must be unnatural
unliving monstrous
let us feed.

Rebecca Salazar's profile page

REBECCA SALAZAR (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

Praise for Rebecca Salazar and antibody

"Rebecca Salazar’s antibody is a future classic of feminist verse. This book is so many things at once and powerfully so: ode, elegy, lamentation, manifesto, rallying call, theoretical treatise. I envision this book not so much arriving to the scene of Canadian poetry as remaking it completely." --Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of Coexistence
"Rebecca Salazar’s antibody is an impressive collection of dualities and contradictions. The holy exists within the unholy, the spiritual within the body, pleasure within pain, dark within light, healing within trauma. In this doubleness, we find complexity that does not oversimplify women’s experiences of gendered violence, rape, and abuse, and the threats that keep them silent. Salazar’s poems allow the speaker and their body to be more than just their trauma, more than what they can give to others: the power of these poems is that they luxuriate in their desires, in the lusciously gory, in magical darkness, in sensual pleasure. Cutting through silence with electric humour, pulsing rhythm, and intoxicating language, Salazar’s poetry becomes both refusal and reclamation, exclaiming 'let none choose for me when i choose to breathe.'" --Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of The Good Arabs