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

Press Coverage

Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2026 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

28 new Canadian poetry titles to check out this spring —CBC Books

Bennett Malcolmson : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Emma McKenna —periodicities

TNQ National Poetry Month Reading List —Selena Mercuri, The New Quarterly

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emma McKenna —rob mclennan’s blog

“A gold star, as McKenna knows, isn’t only a description of a lesbian who never strayed. It can also be a seal of approval, the child’s perfect homework or reward for number of days chores are done. It can refer to a positive online review or to an assessment of a lover, like the narrator’s in ‘Gold Star Redux.’ Most of all, it describes the experience of reading this collection, the gleam of gold amid the dross.” —Carellin Brooks, The British Columbia Review