How does one live through trauma
and emerge applauding all the good
that came from it?
In her debut poetry collection, Julia Gaskill strives to answer this question. weirdo is a praise of girlhood through the lens of grief. This book delves into the death of a mother, the loss of religion alongside the discovery of one’s queerness, and the friends who adore you for all your stubborn eccentricities. Simultaneously a love letter and a eulogy to one’s childhood, weirdo walks a tightrope through a muddled youth to find the people who better you, the memories worth holding onto, and the person who came out the other side despite everything.
In Praise of weirdo:
“weirdo is my favorite kind of poetry book, which is to say that it is a poetry book of self-examination that is rich with sharp wit and clever language, but also does incredible work to be kind to not only the speaker of the poems, but also the many worlds that speaker inhabits and the many people who live among them. These wonderful poems are the best kind of mirror.”
-- Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance
***
“in weirdo, julia gaskill has created a loving portrait of the losses, heartbreaks, and fragile joys of her own girlhood. her writing is singular and instantly recognizable, and her voice is stronger than it’s ever been in this collection. like the stories she tells, it is memorable and entirely her own.”
-- Clementine von Radics, author of In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive
***
For all her poetry’s weirdness, all of the gangly-ness and adolescence and puberty-ness of her poetry; Julia Gaskill is a clear and agile storyteller, who has something important to say. Her work speaks powerfully of the unbreakable connection between the sadness and brightness that exists all at once in our lives. Julia makes a pretty unbeatable argument for the importance of horse girls, the educational qualities of fanfic, and the value of small things that leave us too easily.
-- Brian Stephen Ellis, author of Often Go Awry (University of Hell Press)
“cinematic and captivating, julia gaskill’s “weirdo” is so much more than a collection of poetry— it is a bronze monument erected for the childhood friends who helped the author navigate a patina girlhood suddenly stripped of a mother. it is a time capsule for the eighth grade with all the heartbreak, angst, and awkwardness of a middle school diary, coupled with stunning perception and self-awareness of how our wounds inform our lives. if you’ve ever been to group therapy, “weirdo” will call to mind how, when watching someone else investigate and make meaning of their own psyche, the onlooker is compelled to explore their own. gaskill’s work lives at the intersection of where ‘gay’ and ‘weird’ meet — that gorgeous word ‘queer’ — that unabashed devotion to loving what and who you love without squashing your heart to appease the heartless. throughout the narrative arc of this collection, the writer loses her mother, loses her god, and finds herself in the salvation of early female friendship. finally, this book is a permission slip to be your most authentic self. everyone will want to be a weirdo after reading this. it reads with all the propulsivity of a novel, which is to say, i could not put it down.”
-- megan falley, award winning poet and essayist, author of drive here and devastate me (write bloody publishing 2018)