Excerpts from a Burned Letter: Poems

Award-winning writer Joelle Barron looks back at history through queer eyes in their second poetry collection.

Excerpts from a Burned Letter places the experiences of historical figures and fictional characters in modern contexts—and makes their queerness explicit. This collection highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a post-marriage-equality world, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure.

From the perspective of a single, modern speaker, each poem is haunted by a fictional or historical queer couple, connecting ancestors to their descendants and underlining the ancientness of being queer. The book also explores themes of religion, disability, motherhood, birth, and the experience of being a queer child. The poems zoom in and out; gross, visceral depictions of bodies and their functions stand beside poems that call out the hypocrisies of religion in both its extreme and subtle forms. These poems describe the experience of being a queer person in the present day—writing the queer history of the future.

When searching for stories of themselves in history books, queer people are often met with denial and resistance. Excerpts from a Burned Letter provides explicit acknowledgement where it didn’t exist before: You were here. You live on.

The poems in Excerpts from a Burned Letter are queer devotionals to “those of us who were not quite girls,” with all the witchy laughter and “crabbed tenderness” our bodies deserve. This collection “shoots lasers” even while its “hands are full of viscera,” and gleefully skewers contemporary gender essentialism while summoning underacknowledged queer elders from history. Barron cultivates a garden for once-concealed queerness to flourish, unruly and shamelessly free.

Joelle Barron sets the epistolary form on fire with Excerpts From a Burned Letter where missives from saints and Sailor Neptune blaze ferociously with queer desire. Barron conjures an ecstatic, dirtbag splendour out of the artifacts of queer adolescence—uneven haircuts, faux leather, and Safeway ice cream. More than letters, these poems are a pyre made of grief and need.

This is a slim volume of pages, with ample margins and uncrowded lines. Every word is intentional, hand-carved and carefully painted. The effect is poetry that will enter you through your eyes, your throat, on the wind, and make its way into your chest, where these words in this order will break your heart and then, when you exhale, leave you longing for your next breath of it.

On the surface these poems are about queerness, and closets, and secrets, and illicit love unrequited. Under the words swirl even bigger subjects: how love can mark a heart, how loss can bend a future, and how history can so cruelly erase the truth that lives in all of us.

These poems peel back the corners of girlhood’s many masks and lay rebellious claim to spaces of queer desire and recognition.