Jessie Keary’s 2024 Winning Chapbook
Winner of the 2024 Debut Chapbook Contest
Jessie Keary
Read the chapbook, Explaining a Dress, for free here.
You can purchase the physical book from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Bookshop.org.
Leave a review for Explaining a Dress on Goodreads.
We’re so proud to share Explaining a Dress: Transfeminine Erasure and Vindication by Jessie Keary. These poems move with clarity and courage—reckoning with erasure, survival, and the beauty of becoming. Working with Jessie has been a true honor; every page feels alive with care and precision. We’re thrilled to finally welcome Explaining a Dress into the world.
DESCRIPTION
Explaining a Dress by Jessie Keary is both a recollection and an homage to the forgotten history of trans women. Rooted in the precise craft of erasure poetry, these pieces resonate with quiet protest, sophisticated confidence, and untold violences of the past. In Keary’s work, the clothing of trans women—a white scarf, a gingham gown, silk shirts—becomes an emblem of resistance, tenderness, and the radical beauty of being seen.
PRAISE
In this stunning collection, historical narratives are upended and refashioned into poetry that feels both urgent and necessary. These are poems of witness that urge the reader toward empathy and reflection. The poems bring us face to face with uncomfortable truths from our past and directly confront years of oppression and injustice.
—Nancy Miller Gomez, Guest Judge for the Frontier Poetry Debut Chapbook Prize, author of Inconsolable Objects
Explaining a Dress offers a chorus, a constellation of voices and lives tragically damaged or, worse, ended. This collection of found poems curated into erasure form reminds us of what is left unsaid and, more importantly, what requires timely and timeless shouting.
—Rebecca Evans, author of Safe Handling and Tangled by Blood
Here is a sensory plunge at once harsh and kind, historic and immediate, factual and emotional, heart-rending yet courage-making. Brava! for this remarkable art of erasure and indeed vindication.
—Diana Tokaji, winner of the Frontier Poetry "(NOT) in Love" Tanka Challenge, and author of Six Women in a Cell, Best Indie Book Award Nonfiction
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