Gold Star by Emma McKenna

In this candid and moving collection, Emma McKenna explores the multifaceted themes of bodily autonomy, capturing the empowerment of queer femme identity.

Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.

Examining the way sexism and sexual violence exist as a spectre throughout the lives of women and girls, Gold Star also contemplates issues of child abuse and neglect, reproductive health, and the complex decision to be child-free. Never shying away from the weight of its vital subject matter, this is an urgent and unflinching feminist exploration of embodiment.

Praise for Gold Star

“In Gold Star, Emma McKenna forges a masterful punk queer femme poetics. Flickering between taut and wild lines, these poems whisper about familiar dangers and growl about the guts and craftiness it takes to survive.” —Adèle Barclay, author of Renaissance Normcore

“In Gold Star, Emma McKenna stares unflinchingly into the depths of how we are made and unmade by our relationships with one another and ourselves—the many violences therein. McKenna scales the fences of childhood, womanhood, and queerness to lay bare the cracks that crack us open and attest to how she ‘clawed [her] way back into [her] body.’ Soaked with grief and rage, outstretched towards softness and joy, these poems are rituals of healing that tend to the aches of becoming and belonging.” —Amanda Merpaw, author of Most of All the Wanting

“Emma McKenna’s Gold Star is a body-artifact of existence. When society, with its historical and present violence toward queer disabled people, wants us to disappear, McKenna’s incisive poems refuse. Instead, these poems root themselves in the disabled queer body. McKenna’s poems are not just poems, they are limbs of an embodied history, a ‘tangible witness’ that sees, protects, and reconnects the ever-changing past, present, and future self. Gold Star is a heart-song of coming back to a body that never stops holding us.” —Tea Gerbeza, author of How I Bend Into More