Pet Sounds

Author: Stephanie Young

Publisher: Nightboat Books (2019)

A book of unruly love poems about complicated sexuality, precarity, and kinship

Working from the sticky interface of property and sex, Stephanie Young takes up the question of passing when narrow definitions of family on offer by the law and capitalist social relations leave out so much. With a cast of characters that includes lovers and exes, Troilus and Cressida, Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead, Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala, Pat Parker and Judy Grahn, the orca Tilikum and his captors, Pet Sounds is at once a book of confessional economics, music criticism disguised as poetry, and a complicated coming out story. These poems pulse with the pleasures and grief of making a home inside structures that don’t fit―on land whose value climbs ever upward in the frenzy of speculation.

2020 Lambda Literary Award Winner