antibody

Raymond Souster Award, Winner
Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry, Finalist
J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award, Finalist
Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist

Praise for Rebecca Salazar and antibody

“What reluctant spells Rebecca Salazar’s antibody casts on the page, and with what speed their flames catch light in your hands. This collection cauterizes you in places you did not know needed healing. Ethereal, cinematic, and propulsive, Salazar’s is a many-winged poetics that endures and helps us endure—every turn a gasp, every reversed trope a hatchet cutting rotgut from precious earth-bodies, from an ever-expanding organism of queer-disabled-survivor rage. What unleashes is as wise as it is eviscerating. Above all, antibody addresses the festering wounds of cis-heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and mass disabling climate disasters without eliding the ugliness of what these processes do to a person. An almanac of curse and ceremony, antibody is here to catch your breath just as you lose it. Its abundance of care and honesty greet our moment, histories, and possibilities with the bristling hum of ‘tongue-cut birds’ that will stay with you for lifetimes.” —Raymond Souster Award Jury

“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