Queers Like Me by Michael V. Smith

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith’s latest collection explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.

In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the awkward dinners, the funerals, and the uncertainty of navigating fraught dynamics, bringing us into these most intimate moments of family life, while outrunning deep grief. Smith moves from first home to first queer experiences; the becoming that emanates from exploring one’ s sexuality. Teenage crushes, video cameras, post-club hookups, fears and terrors, closeted lovers, daydreams of confronting your childhood bully: here is a broad tapestry of a contemporary life.

Queers Like Me is an enveloping book—a meditation on family complexity and a celebration of personal insight.

Praise for Queers Like Me:

“A verse memoir from several perspectives of identity, Queers Like Me is a faceted lexicon of Smith’s experience of grief, desire, alienation, aging, and happiness. A warm, witty-tragic tale told in lineated conversational intimacy, with lines like ‘I’m a bit emotionally barren / with some singing and dancing / thrown in,’ this confessional/anti-confessional text feels like a friend you could talk to about anything.” —Sharon Thesen, author of The Wig-Maker

“Michael V. Smith is Canada’s answer to Frank O’Hara. In poems at once charming in tone and yet devastating in subtext, rollicking in language and dignified in what is said as well as what remains unspoken, Queers Like Me explores the nature of family, place, and belonging from the perspective of a life lived on the artistic edge.” —George Murray, author of Problematica: New and Selected Poems