Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Author Photo: Adrianne Mathiowetz
$18 | 86 pages | ISBN: 978-1-936919-99-4
Poetry l Perfectbound | June 18, 2024
Praise for Tanya Olson's poetry:
“Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices.”—Dorothea Lasky
“Olson’s drumming cadence, use of repetition, wide-angled personifications, and stunning imagination are all at play here, often magnificently so.”
—The Rumpus
“Tanya Olson’s magnificent poems carry the weight of giants, tigers, and The People’s Acts of Love. Every page is a new cleansing fire.” —CA Conrad
Born Backwards
Born Backwards is available now!
Reviews of Born Backwards
"Olson’s poems are true companions: they speak colloquially and confessionally, administer tough love, and hold the reader’s hand, dragging them into the rural, familial, and visceral. This is a disarming, shimmering book."
—starred review in Publishers Weekly"Olson’s poems untangle the complex feeling of missing places and people that have hurt us, and explore how we can return to these places with forgiveness for others and for ourselves.
Hope—as a sincere belief in the human capacity for change—sings through these pages."
—Lauren Mantis for Harbor Review
About Born Backwards
Born Backwards, Tanya Olson’s third collection, reports from inside butch culture in the 1980s American South as it traces how geography, family, experiences, and popular culture shape one queer life. The collection argues for recording these moments before they disappear, not for the purposes of nostalgia but because of their importance to building a future. Like much of Olson’s other work, these poems locate the extraordinary within the commonplace— hearing the songs of the Carter Family, reading a child’s version of Frankenstein, discovering k.d. lang, and watching soap operas with a grandmother become the building blocks of becoming an individual.
About the Author
Tanya Olson is the author of Boyishly, which won the American Book Award, Stay, and her newest collection, Born Backwards, all out from YesYes Books. She is also the recipient of a Discovery/Boston Review prize and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poems have been included in Best American Poems 2015 and Please Excuse This Poem. Olson has been a featured reader at the Enoch Pratt Reading Series, Outwrite DC, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the Dodge Poetry Festival.
