Overview

Living Fossils invites readers into an unnatural history museum where coelacanths, horseshoe crabs, goblin sharks, and other curious creatures illuminate a narrative of queer and trans survival. Born in Paraguay and adopted to the United States, Guay navigates complex experiences of gender, commodification, and otherness through fish that order at gas station diners, toads that do magic tricks, and dinosaur skeletons that glow. Drawing together playfully ekphrastic prose poems and lyric investigations of violence, this collection wanders the exhibit halls of U.S. empire and emerges with a portrait of what it means to keep living in the face of extinction.

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9781680034622

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Reviews

Living Fossils is the type of chapbook I always want in my back pocket--rich with imagery and ruminations on gender and various flora and fauna who (like trans folk) have been around for centuries. It is researched yet approachable, capacious yet clear in its vision that accumulates into a delicious book of poems full of ekphrasis and quotable lines like 'I become familiar / with the bright edge of terror.' I learned something about lungfish, toads, and the world (among other things) from this book. I can't wait for others to read it. --KB Brookins, author of Pretty: A Memoir, and Contest Judge --KB Brookins ""What part of a living fossil is the part that lives?"" This profound contradiction in terms haunts the heart of L. M. Guay's chimerical, brilliantly kaleidoscopic debut chapbook. From their birthplace of Asunción, Paraguay, Guay charts complex migratory patterns as an adoptee to the U.S. They navigate gender, ethnicity, and nationality across poems that are exquisitely intimate and genuinely jarring in the delicate architecture of their composition. Guay's verses explode with otherworldly figurations of familiar creatures, such as the false killer whale (""an alien dipped in engine oil"") and giant squid (""the pink of the unbruised tulip""). These poems chase enigmas of ancestry through the lobed fins of the ancient coelacanth, funnel questions of queer identity through the rainbow spirals of nautilus shells, and confront ugly expectations of daughterhood through the misplaced cranium of a radioactive allosaurus. These are extremely potent poems of estrangement and stranding, from one's body, from one's family, from one's country. In the end, Guay's singularly especial voice remains fixed on the ultimate Paraguayan export: the speaker themself. I could not be more excited for Guay's poems to reach the world! --Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White --Diego Báez To use Guay's own words inside, this gathering of poems is ""hard evidence of what the body sings through."" A tender and unflinchingly honest exploration of lineage, flesh, and the preservation of queer life. The poems in Living Fossils are a pulsing heart of paradox--metaphysical and undeniably concrete, tender and unbreakable, deeply structural and utterly boundless. I could barely give in to putting them down. --Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography --Stacey Waite

Author Information

LOREN MARIA GUAY is a poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in beestung, ANMLY, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere; they have been a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize in Poetry, a Best of the Net nominee, and a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and adopted to/raised in Brooklyn, they are currently a Ph.D. student in English and Education at the University of Michigan.

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