Kissing Keeps Us Afloat by Laurie MacFayden is humorous and joyful, uninhibited and sassy; MacFayden positively swaggers with her love of words and imagery. This is her second book with Frontenac House; her first volume, White Shirt, from Dektet 2010, won two important prizes from the United States: the Golden Crown Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.

Laurie MacFayden's profile page

• Winner, Golden Crown Award for poetry

Laurie MacFayden is a writer, visual artist, photographer and former sports journalist. Her debut poetry collection, White Shirt (Frontenac House, April 2010), was shortlisted for the 2011 Lambda Literary Awards and won a Golden Crown Literary Award. Kissing Keeps Us Afloat is her second poetry manuscript. Her writing has appeared in The New Quarterly literary magazine, Queering The Way, the Spire Poetry Poster, and the Ontario Poetry Societys chapbook anthology Love: The Main Course. A frequent performer with Edmonton's Raving Poets and Stroll of Poets, she was a regional finalist in the 2008 CBC National Poetry Faceoff and contributed to the inaugural online cycle of Dailyhaiku.org, and its first print offshoot, DailyHaiku I: A Daily Shot of Zen. She blogs at http://spatherdab.com

The colour red infuses Kissing Keeps Us Afloat as blood, anger, and love infiltrate our lives. Red flows as wondrous crayons shading in the shape of a life lived passionately. With flashes of humour and the occasional playful rhyme, Laurie MacFayden urges us to keep loving, losing, caring, and colouring. Not always with the red crayons, but these poems remind us to keep those ones — in their hues of crimson and lust — well-sharpened.
-- Kimmy Beach

A pantoum, honky-tonk tunes, swinging & searing verses, meditative narratives, and catalogues of favoured things (including what lovers bring--or leave behind), all merge to make Kissing Keeps Us Afloat a book for tongues and lips to sing. MacFayden knows painting and music, and she loves words and women. The result is art without limit, craft without regret, and poetry that faces trauma and embraces the erotic. MacFayden tells us, "some days," a poet "will swagger home with roses; / some days, she will stagger home with thorns." Because her heart and mind are open to hurts and salves, the poet both suffers and exults. She sets her eyes--and sights--directly on bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, beaches, forest glades, motels, streets, and all the passion plays and comedies enacted in these places. Thus, she shows us that home is where the lover is, and home is where love is born, "hidden ... in mitochondrial strands" or even in "the intimate seams of some underthings." MacFayden's poetry is both red-hot and cool-blue, white lies and film noir, memory and truth. In the supposed mundane, she shows us, transcendence awaits.
-- George Elliott Clarke