Stray Harbor by Rage Hezekiah

Stray Harbor is a collection that helps us remember what it is like to discover the world for the first time. It is a tender meditation on how we learn to love our family and how we learn to love ourselves. Rage Hezekiah has given us a stunning debut, one that signals we’re only at the beginning of what promises to be a remarkable literary life.

—Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent

Hezekiah summons the power of water as we learn to swim and learn to drown in her debut work, Stray Harbor. She introduces us to the fabled Feminist Safe House where her mother taught her the endurance of womanhood, a journey that first requires devastation: “you teach the child / what it is to drown / so she’ll know / to save herself.” She leaves us a bit broken on the shore, that transitional place where the tides invite intoxication and a need to witness what in our living requires abandon. This is an important debut collection.

–Amber Flora Thomas, author of Red Channel in the Rupture, The Rabbits Could Sing, and Eye of Water

Stray Harbor invites the reader back into the body, where we find both lonesomeness and abundance. Here, we are called to bear witness to a child who, at nine, “understand[s] the solitude of the cove before dawn,” a father who, “surrenders his fierceness” in water, and a mother in search of reclamation and healing. In a lyric so incredibly tender and finely tuned to the sonic beauty of language, Rage Hezekiah invites her reader to delight in the queer beauty of life, the “unexpected coven” reclaiming “the bellow of our voices,” a woman “head bowed/in reverence to her own/powerful hands,/summoning song.” What a song has been summoned here. What a blessed offering, this book, to the weary soul.

–Brionne Janae, author of After Jubilee