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Lines in the Shed
Lines in the Shed is a gutsy follow-up to Ryan Tracy’s debut collection Tender Bottoms (2022). At ninety-two pages, this book of poems takes aim at sanguine American claims to consensus, unity, and safety. Instead, Lines in the Shed offers at-close-range portraits of a social fracture, everyday paranoia, and unspoken antagonisms, major and minor. Yet Tracy’s frank appraisal of environmental and emotional crises doesn’t surrender vision to despair. At home in the American quotidian tradition of O’Hara, Williams, and Wright, these poems never lose sight of what matters, what’s gay, what comes up short, what we can’t live without, and what endures in the daily struggle to live in the world with strangers, family, and—perhaps the book’s most urgent heroes—friends. In unguarded language that by turns sparkles and dares, these poems invite readers to desire the world as the poet does, to “take notice” (as one poem suggests), and to share lines of poetry as a means of survival… and celebration.
Published by Auntie Press through Troy Book Makers.
Book design by Suyash Chitrakar.
Support Local Booksellers: Lines in the Shed is available for purchase on this site. But you can also find it at these locations: Citiot (Catskill, NY), Wordsmith Bookshoppe (Galesburg, IL), and Prairie Lights (Iowa City, IA).
“Lines in the Shed refreshes my faith in so many signs of life… the poems decree it as much of a crime to waste good light as to waste a good lay.”
MORE ADVANCED PRAISE FOR LINES IN THE SHED
“In poems that alternate between whimsy and wisdom, Lines in the Shed… hints at filthy acts that your mouth wants to repeat.”
– Michael Walsh, author of Creep Love and The Dirt Riddles
“Ryan Tracy’s Lines in the Shed… is a charged and changeable map of the poet’s desire lines… leading to places both ordinary and unexpected, but always finding their way back home.”
– Hai-Dang Phan, author of Reenactments and Small Wars
“whimsical, powerful, sexy”
Tender Bottoms
Ryan Tracy’s debut collection of poems, Tender Bottoms, explores the pleasures and anxieties of contemporary gay domestic life—the vicissitudes of romantic attachment, aging, fucking, social accountability, politics, and the reliance on life-sustaining pharmaceuticals—refracted in an homage to Gertrude Stein. Complimented by original full-color photographs, the poems hew to and depart from Stein’s style, finding something new to value in her poetic innovations while also asking for something more, not just from Stein, but from the present moment. In poems that range from the limpid to the ornate, the aphasic to the prosaic, a wry map of pleasure and presentiment emerges, pointing the way toward what Stein called “the bottom nature” of modern life.
Our inventory is SOLD OUT. But you might find copies at select retailers including Adam’s Nest (Provincetown, NY), Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza (Albany, NY), Market Block Books (Troy, NY), Citiot (Catskill, NY), and The Spotty Dog Books & Ale (Hudson, NY).
Published by Auntie Press through Troy Book Makers.
Book design by Michael Hofmann.
MORE ADVANCED PRAISE FOR TENDER BOTTOMS
“Tracy responds to Stein with unabashed enthusiasm … and the electric movements of a consciousness coming to a boil”
–Chris Campanioni
“Campy yet earnest, Tracy’s voice is clear and resolved, clever and accessible”
–Angelo Nikolopoulos
Video poem “& So” from Tender Bottoms, ft. Iris Cushing and Patrick James