Fifty poems to dance (awkwardly) between queer and anxious spaces.

Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.

Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published poems in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. They’ve also published creative nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series (shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), the Parallel Parks series and, most recently, The Winter Knight with ECW.

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