poetry chapbook
ISBN 978-1-957746-18-0
46 pages
Transference is a collection of prose poems encapsulating unrequited queer desire between patient and therapist. Through an attentive use of address and apostrophe, the poems question the process of grief, what it means to "move on," and the presence and absence of love on the psyche.
Praise for Transference:
"Katie Jean Shinkle’s Transference is a miracle, a dance-track set made from poems that sublimate pain and death and surrender with the insistent deep-sea beat of each poem’s bravery, overlaid with the charismatic cacophony of each poem’s doubts, compulsions, and the deepest needs that have grown their own lights like anglerfish. Reading these transgressively seductive poems made me want to sink and sink and sink into the needy wound made up of fallen petals and creeping vines that pulse in time to the insistent voice, a voice that is chopped and screwed by the body’s possibilities for abjection and pleasure and connection and rejection." Ginger Ko
"Katie Jean Shinkle's electric chapbook is a queer fever dream of therapy sessions gone wrong, where professional and emotional boundaries dissolve into a steamy landscape of desire and obsession. Through gorgeously crafted prose poems that pulse with erotic tension and vulnerability, the poet navigates desire, abandonment, and a sometimes destructive search for healing. This little volume serves pure sapphic chaos; it will leave you breathless and begging for another session." Megan Kaminski
"In a collection brimming with lyric wit, sly vulnerability, and queer femme sleaze, Katie Jean Shinkle proves why she is the reigning monarch of uncomfortable truths. This little book is a marvel." Jessica Rae Bergamino
Katie Jean Shinkle’s books and chapbooks include Tannery Bay (FC2, coauthored with Steven Dunn, 2024) and The Only Way Out is Through (YesYes Books, forthcoming). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Witness, and elsewhere. Awarded fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary and Ragdale, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.