Renaissance Normcore belts like a classically trained riot grrrl, composing catchy tunes in the key of fear and desire. Building on the dreamy emotional landscapes she plumbed in If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, Barclay navigates even sharper peaks and valleys in her second collection to examine the links between intimacy and power. Tracking the paradoxical impulses of anguish and joy that underpin daily life in our hostile neoliberal climate, these poems are both abject and sweet as they repurpose loss into life and test the bounds of how much a poem can hold.

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, glitterMOB, The Puritan, PRISM international and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016), was nominated for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is Arc Magazine’s Poet in Residence and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press. She lives on unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC.

Adèle Barclay's profile page

• Short-listed, ReLit Awards in the Poetry category

“Barclay’s poems are full of queer joy, queer anxiety, queer yearning and queer solidarity. She has a knack for juxtaposing words and images in playful, unexpected ways.”

Discorder Magazine

Toronto Star