Overview

The Only Way Out is Through chronicles the way in which we archive the Other in queer relationships: Through images, through memories, through narrative, and through recollection. In the midst of queer heartbreak and the exploration of desire-gone-wrong, fueled by addiction, reckoning of identity, and unearthing of secrets that keep us unseen, this chapbook-length essay follows a slowly unraveling break-up. As the narrator and the Other traverse the painstaking journey of realizing the relationship is over, the essay explores how secrets make us sick, how remaining unseen keeps us repressed, and how love sometimes is not enough to save the other person from themselves. Following the break-up to its end reveals more than simply an ending, but a freedom and new beginning for the narrator as the question gets answered: How does one make it through the other side of devastating loss? The answer is: The only way out is through. The Only Way Out Is Through is a hauntingly elegiac meditation on the unyielding desire to start over."" -eileen elizabeth espinoza, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying World

Full Product Details

9781946303127

Table of Contents

Reviews

Katie Jean Shinkle's The Only Way Out Is Through is a contemplation on 'ghost-time, ' the pasts we erase, but which remain nonetheless, which persist. It tells a story of a breakup, or rather a story of multiple breakages, severances between / within self and other, intimacy, love, care-a story that repeatedly opens and closes on the possibility of change, of renewal, much like the process of living itself."" -thirii myo kyaw myint, Names for Light: A Family History ""The writing in The Only Way Out Is Through is exquisitely crafted; full of ruination, clutter, addiction, disarray, shame, destruction, but most importantly growth-the untangling of the endings of one space and the beginnings that remain."" -luna rey hall, loudest when startled ""What does it mean to want to change when you feel chained to your insatiable desires? Shinkle's adept ability to dig open the wounds of addiction (and the fear of attempting recovery) is singular. The Only Way Out Is Through will make you question the gin-soaked American mythos surrounding the arts and allow us to heal, to imagine the possibilities of life when one grants the self permission to want more, to love better."" -min kang, darkly + completely

Author Information

KATIE JEAN SHINKLE's books and chapbooks include The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays (YesYes Books, 2026), Transference (Gasher Press, 2025), and Tannery Bay (coauthored with Steven Dunn, FC2, 2024). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Awarded fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary and Ragdale, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available