alaomai; haunted willow, by Raphael Lassauze

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features. alaomai; haunted willow is Raphael Lassauze’s first chapbook. Through an interconnected series of poems, she charts love and melancholy, mental illness and astronomies of joy through queer scenes and personal endeavours through life as a poor sex worker excited by the world around her. The collages feature her adventures through graveyards, through the marks of lovers, and explorations through research into insomnia, rimbaud, and the landscape of the city she loves so dearly. over the course of a mere month and a half, Lassauze maps out what living in a state of wandering means to her. the ins and outs of trying to live in a sense of disconnect toward the notion of home due to her having no permanent residence at the time of writing. to explore these difficulties, these notions of finding beauty despite and because of fragility, is to fall freely through a night sky inundated with love. Raphael Lassauze is a queer transfemme writer living in Queens. Her work ranges from magical transfeminist fairy and folktale/fabulist writings to absurd experimental wanderings and experimental melancholic poetics. All her work centers upon queer people, usually transfemmes like herself, in a varied flux of self and unreality, trying to realize a glittering joy.