PaperDebut979-8-89990-728-92026This title will be released on October 23, 2026
Liner Notes is an innovative, deeply intimate hybrid of poetry, memoir, and cultural criticism that traces a queer Southern man’s journey through staggering loss and fierce love. Structured like a pop song, each section composes a new track in the author’s evolving soundtrack of grief—after the deaths of his partner Jim, his father, and his closest friend Josh—while weaving in pop music, film, disability studies, and the textures of Southern family life. Through lyric vignettes, narrative poems, and intertextual riffs on artists from Taylor Swift to Boy George, the book transforms mourning into meaning, stitching together memory and media to show how art becomes a survival strategy. Liner Notes is an elegy, a cultural mixtape, and an unflinching testament to how we carry the people we’ve lost with us into every new measure.
Jamie L. McDaniel was born and raised in Northeast Alabama, a place that influences much of his work. He is Professor of English in the School of Writing, Language, and Literature at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is the winner of the 2025 Chautauqua Creative Writing Contest for Poetry. Liner Notes is his debut poetry collection.
PRAISE:.Every once in a while you run up on a book that takes the stuff of life—the songs and the movies and the people that hurt us and the people that help us, what we eat and where we live, and mashes it all together on the page in a way that is beautiful and real and it makes you smile and makes you cry and makes your stomach hurt and makes you sputter in amazement that people can weave such magic out of twenty-six letters, a few punctuation marks, and a blank screen. Liner Notes by Jamie McDaniel is such a book.–Robert Gipe, author of Trampoline, Weedeater, and Pop
Like any good pop song, Jamie McDaniel’s Liner Notes is at once tender and unflinching, straightforward and beguilingly complex. The poems in this collection thread deftly between an open ache and a ferocity of perception and perspective—as simultaneously sweet and sharp as a Southerner saying “Bless your heart.” Packed with both pop culture references and the specifics of a small-town Southern life, McDaniel’s poems navigate the treacherous waters of grief with grace, humor, and courage. From queer love and identity to the local arcade, what emerges from these pages is not simply a collection about loss, but also a love letter to the body, to home in all of its permutations, and to those the leaving leave behind. This is a collection for anyone who knows that sorrow is predicated on joy, and mourning means celebrating the life that was lived. “Grief,” McDaniel argues, “is repetition,” and readers will find themselves returning to the pages of this brilliant debut time and time again.–Darby Price, author of All the Lands We Inherit
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