Additional information
by Lucas Crawford (Author)
In March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.
Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.
As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.
Author Biography
Lucas Crawford is the author of five books, including the award-winning poetry collections Sideshow Concessions and Belated Bris of the Brainsick. His poetry and scholarship focus on relationships between space, aesthetics, bodies, and queer conceptions of health. Lucas has spent most of his life in rural areas of Mi ' kma ' ki but currently lives on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Alberta. He is Canada Research Chair of Transgender Creativity and Mental Health at the University of Alberta's Augustana Faculty.
