This title will be released on October 30, 2026
2026 Featured Fall Book in American Poets (The Journal of the Academy of American Poets)
Skeletons, Sequins, and Kin is a poetry collection that traces the queer body as both battleground and sanctuary, weaving together stories of survival, kinship, nightlife, and inheritance. Moving through bruises and glitter, protest and prayer, the poems chart how identity is written into flesh, remade on dance floors, and carried in chosen family. Divided into four sections, the collection begins with explorations of embodiment, birth certificates, closets, scars, and the ways a body insists on its own truth. It moves into the bloodlines we claim and the kin we create, honoring aunties, ghosts, and chosen family who stitch resilience from scar tissue. The third section turns to nightlife as sacred ground, where sweat, sequins, and basslines become a form of liturgy and protection. The final movement reckons with memory and inheritance, what we carry in our bones, the names we sharpen, the scars we keep as love letters, and the ancestors we become for ourselves. At once tender and defiant, these poems illuminate queer survival as an act of radical kinship. They testify that joy, body reclamation, and community are not afterthoughts to struggle but the very conditions of belonging. #QueerPoetry #TransPoets #NonbinaryVoices #QueerCreatives #LGBTQPoetry
Reece Thomas –
Skeletons, Sequins, and Kin is a profound reclamation, a beautiful and so very tender exploration of how it feels to grow inside of one’s queerness, to learn acceptance as a practice, and to become. Poetry is an art, and Wednesdae is a brilliant artist. This book offers such a timely and needed softness in a cruel world, and I highly recommend reading this — your inner child will thank you.