Description
Participating in the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge? Read Phoenix Song for prompt number 41: a memoir that explores queerness.
In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. Phoenix Song was originally published by Nomadic.
PHOENIX SONG has many recurring themes—non-binary gender, queer and bi+ sexuality, and childhood and psychiatric trauma. As the traumas resonate within the speaker, we understand them as the root of mental health struggles—rather than clinical, problematic psychiatric “diagnosis.” As the speaker moves from lyrical embodiment of deep feeling to the clarity of prose, they are set free and return, renewed by flame, to the joys of pleasure and their song. It’s true we are all the heroes of our own stories, but we are also sometimes part of something bigger—a bright, sparkling, magic, urgent wave of not-so-delicate beasts, cresting through the water, a surge, a collective: “me too.” This collection offers an incantation, a wisdom synthesized by both mind and body.
Praise
With Phoenix Song, Green establishes themself once again as a fiery truth-teller, a writer not afraid to taste the pomegranate or to stare directly into the portrait lens before the shutter clicks. This is a journey to the center of the soul. I wanted to carry this book against my chest like a nametag, like a shield. I look forward to more and more of Green’s work in the future.
–Meg Elison, author of Big Girl
To encounter LD Green’s Phoenix Song is to experience the complex & layered anomalies, truths, & joys of identity, gender, & radical self-advocacy. With their gentle laughter & no-bullshit demeanor, here is a protagonist we can trust. We shape-shift & coalesce along with the book’s hybrid structure & lyric, becoming in dance with its spectral hues until finally, we emerge – clean as light.
–Melissa Eleftherion Carr, Poet Laureate of Ukiah and author, field guide to autobiography
Lose yourself in this delightfully queer volume, oozing with subversion, kaleidoscopic truth, and shimmering unicorn energy. Here around the sparkling, flickering rainbow fire LD Green has created, you will find yourself staring into the healing flames, and you’ll know that you’re not alone. Whether exploring radical mental health, the complex spectrum of trans identity, the lingering effects of trauma, or the liberation of bi experience, Green’s prose and poetry made me feel seen and honored in a way I have not experienced for a long time in the pages of a book. Phoenix Song is not just a chapbook; it is a soothing balm in words, centering and elevating the lived experiences of those who have all too often found themselves at the margins.
—L. Harris, writer, facilitator, and mental health advocate
In Phoenix Song, LD Green constructs an abiding sense of personal identity, excavating meaning from the ashes of intimate traumas, losses and momentary feelings of inner disintegration and confronting the painful, more often than not unaddressed complexities of mental health and the psychiatric miscategorization of inherent states of being. A beautifully profound and rewarding read.
–Ellery Washington, Professor of Writing at the Pratt Institute, author of Buffalo
LD Green’s Phoenix Song travels across identity to ambitiously explore sexuality, gender, mental health and healing. However, that ambition never eclipses the heart of this hybrid collection: its tenderness, its humor, its crystalline need to commune and marvel in our complex human experience. You can feel the love in these pages.
–Miah Jeffra, St. Lawrence Book Award and Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist for The Violence Almanac
A beautiful, poignant, and resilient collection of poetry and prose exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, mental health, and being embodied.
–Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity and Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive
LD Green whispers healing tears into their Phoenix Song. With the alchemy of a herd of unicorns, they transform other people’s narratives of their childhood trauma and psychiatric dis-ease into an anthem of survivorship, a reclamation of dangerous gifts, and a fantastical recockinging with identity. Unapologetic, non-binary, and quippy, Green takes the reader on a journey of melodic freedom and revelations that scorch untruths about gender, sexuality, mental health, and love. This rebirth is tender, bold, funny and heart touching. A true gift from a writer who shares, ‘my nature is to burn.’ ”
— Kelechi Ubozoh, Co-Editor of We’ve Been Too Patient
