Poetry
The Choice Is Real
- Publisher
- Metatron Press
- Published
- 2023
- Pages
- 88
- Price
- $20.00
- ISBN
- 9781988355344
- Language
- English
On the publisher’s site (opens in a new tab) In bookstores (opens in a new tab)
The team behind the book
- Editing
- Hannah Karpinski
- Cover
- Antonia Colodro
- Design
- Ashley Obscura
I wake up most mornings to do what. Dress my genitals for occasion. What odd formality. What choices. A twat cravat. A Hanes which way. Fruit of the looming cunt cataclysm. Will I bite.
Jayson Keery’s world-building poems reimagine the coming-of-age narrative for queer and trans people. Winner of The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (Poetry), The Choice is Real is a romp through millennial media landscapes and an interrogation of their power as systems of early childhood gender programming.
Challenging the conventions of how queer and trans people are encouraged to tell their stories, The Choice is Real engages the concept of choice in queerness and trivializes the linear “born-this-way” narratives that queer people are sold. In response to a second puberty brought on by medical transition and an unravelling of family structures following the death of their stepmother, Keery regresses through a warped and foreboding childhood landscape saturated with pop culture iconography. Writing with and against Disney classics, Keery moves between formative memories and contemporary moments, weaving in accounts of current relations in their playful uprooting of assumptions of queer relationality. Opening with a cheeky epigraph from trans author and activist Lou Sullivan: “I love being a girl. So delicate,” The Choice is Real explodes with celebration and criticism of girlhood from a transmasculine perspective.
Description from the publisher Metatron Press, seen in October 2026 · Source ↗
Launch
- Thursday, June 1, 2023, 7:30 p.m. · URSA, Montréal · See the event
From Metatron Press
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Aqueous Mind Bath
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Wavering Futures Kawai Shen
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Lateral Sway Hannah Karpinski
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all the time Xiaoxuan Huang
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Opening Ceremony Laura Marie Marciano
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Continuum Ivanna Baranova
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The Snakes Came Back Lora Mathis
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Little Fury Casey Bell
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Thirty Marie Darsigny
