Gwen Aube is the author of Missed Connections with Tall Girls (LittlePuss Press, 2026). She is a 2026 Al Purdy A-Frame Artist-In-Residence & 2025 AiR with the Ontario Heritage Council. She was a finalist for the 2025 PEN Canada New Voices Award, as well as a Kevin Killian Scholarship recipient for the Jack Kerouac School. Her chapbook pulp necrosis was published by above/ground press.
Conyer Clayton: Right from the start of the collection, with the epigraph from Richard Rohr (“God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.” p.11), we see a gesturing towards the divine through both revolutionary practices and literal religious spaces. I was struck by the following lines:
“THE SACRED AND THE
LIBERATORY
BLUR BECAUSE THEY ARE
BOTH MYSTERY—
BOTH STRUGGLE —BOTH
LOVE—” (p.52)
and
“for this fate, i prayed
at the unitarian church
& the week after at
the anglican church
& the week after at
the gnostic church
in the yoga studio,
progressively finding myself
in stupider &
stupider places, cooking down
pomp & circumstance
to its base components:
mother, child, moon,
blood, sex, time,” (p.86)
Can you speak about your handling of this theme?
Gwen Aube:
So for background, I’ve had a twin set of religious experiences over the last few years. First, I started attending the aforementioned Anglican church, as well as reading theology & post-secular philosophy & such. Second, I (finally!) attended several Radical Faerie gatherings, basically mystical pagan dionysian festivals of queer holiness, which shook me to my core. Both of these spaces are primarily spiritual sites for me, but they’re also inseparably political in nature, with people advocating “works”, a radical theosis, or liberation as a spiritual cause.
The book plays with transgenderISM as virus & civilizational death-cult a lot, and for me this is really in conversation with the bits about motherhood—I don’t want this queerphobia keeping us from the human project, which one could “cook down” to that shit in the quote, mother child moon blood sex time. This, to me, is a deeply spiritual hope, situating love not just among those known to us, but among our ancestors and those who will come after us. Richard Gilman-Opalsky says that love is fundamentally outside exchange-value. Time (in this regard) acts as an illusory function of capital, and to situate storge (greekin out bitch) within deep time, beyond the functional unit, is a holy & revolutionary practice, whatever that’s worth. Like, Cuba’s Family Code is a lovely move. God willing they survive the horrific siege against them. It all just makes you want to pray, yknow?
I should say also, like many, I’ve been struck by Simone Weil. I heard about her thru Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (in hindsight, I don’t love its read of Weil, but it’s a nice book). I really, really fell in love with her. The way Weil talks about love, God, and “the good” as basically synonyms really shaped these poems. At one point I was at Webster Library daily reading her (& Diogenes Allen’s readings of her), walking around all day replaying David Cayley’s wonderful CBC radio series on her. I cried alongside the trans-canada highway at Cayley’s daughter’s reading of Weil’s quotes, which she does with such humanity.
Sorry if I’m just like name-dropping here, others are infinitely smarter than this at me & I’m still a novice reader of it, but I’m deeply grateful to be taking in the liturgy and the communal-cooking forest-orgy and writing towards the thing. I have always loved, above all, this beatific feeling.
CC: There is an incredible and effective blend of humour, desire, and violence (“if beauty is violence, let us be beautiful. / if god suffers with us, let us suffer.” p.91), and in particular, as the speaker thinks about their yearning for connection/love with/for trans women (“she shall be loved the way i have been loved—like an attack / on the stupid immutable flesh of the world. // brutally, relentlessly, without condition or mercy or pause, / she shall be loved by me.” p. 92).
How did you approach balancing love and violence around this topic?
GA: That quoted poem is about my trans-mother, Ottawa-born novelist and painter Sybil Lamb. We lived together for like 8 years, and one time, years ago now, she was goading me on cuz she was in a bad mood. She wouldn’t fuck off, so I slapped her hard in the face. Six seconds of mutual flailing later she had me in a chokehold up against the unfinished drywall. Winner, Gagnon! I won’t ever do it again, I should plead here, don’t hit people—it was parental, yknow? We’ve carried our friend with multiple-sclerosis home together, we’ve kept the cops out when runaway girls got into fist-fights over cig money, we’ve dug pits and hopped trains together. Our love has been lived in the body, and that poem reflects our context.
More
broadly, the majority of the world, much of which works in slave conditions to
procure our pulp & ink, is a fundamentally violent one. Primarily cuz
colonial domination, but also cuz the frictionless society of the western
professional-managerial arts worker is a fiction provided thru that
subjugation. I grew up in a relatively violent environment & also one which
was overflowing with love. Bataille has the thing about Eros and Death, which
isn’t really what I’m working with (I think the love in this book is rarely
eros), but there’s something of that type of fundamental tension here, too.
As for the mentioned violence of beauty, I still don’t know how to talk about
this well. I think in general I’m quite intimidated by beauty as a topic.
Suffice it to say the esthetician’s office is a clinical site of pure violence,
going there for laser hair removal is like touching Hell, yet I too desire to
get my shit peeled back for the 8-trillion-dollar Helen-of-Troy-face surgery.
CC: The importance of maintaining class consciousness is apparent within your narrative choices. The book is dedicated to homeless people, one of the sections is titled “Wearing a Fur Coat to the Welfare Office,” and various character’s positions within capitalism are continually addressed. Given the largely queer and trans speakers and characters, can you expand on the elevated importance of class consciousness to you within this book’s context?
GA: There was a study some years back in the UK (it was the British Sociological Foundation one, I think) which showed that among professional artists, those with working-class backgrounds had dropped from 16% to 8% in a decade or something. This means 92% of artists working professionally in the UK had went to Wiggly Cockswallow’s Finishing School, or whatever. When I open a litmag, it is often a bunch of elegies about getting micro-agressed by your thesis advisor. I’m empathetic of course, but as art it’s just awful. I’ve known plenty crackheads, and they have great stories to tell, and language which tastes like something. We need more crackheads in the fine arts. For that to happen, Ontario Works needs to give more than $733 per month.
Of interest to the book, queer and trans people are of course more likely to face employment discrimination and live in abject poverty. Queers are also, like the unwashed masses more broadly, cockroach-esque in our resilience, which I find beautiful. Equally interesting, however, is how trans women have that (seemingly-real??) internal petit-bourgeoisie of tech-job girlies—which is fascinating when you view us economically & culturally as a “diaspora”, and even juicier when you get into the ways in which surveillance tech fucks over poor trannies. But those are the girls mutual-aids’ing our tits fatter, too! Those girls have paid my rent, and my proximity to them is due to my transsexuality! There’s a Marxist analysis of the puppygirl polycule to be made, and I don’t think my book does it, but (like the puppygirl herself) it’s fun to poke around in.
In the closing long poem, For Herma, I cast the pregnant woman and the sea-monster in Gustav Klimt’s painting Hope 1 as lesbian lovers. They are unable to birth their unborn child because they’re literally in a painting, and thus figures of “the Imaginary”, cut-off by capital-H History, a sort of blockage of possibility within a world which irritatingly necessitates the materialist appraisal. The importance of the class analysis, which has been downgraded by an arts culture steeped in liberal institutions, is not exactly elevated within the queer context, but rather the queer subject is beautifully both within and therefore kinda the whole of the proletarian (ultimately, human!!!) subject. Yet, like the figures in the painting, one dreams of a time when the working class is not needed to be the driving force of history, when the fae may take the reigns.
CC: I was delighted by the way you use sound play to amplify moments of hedonism. For example, in “SIN”:
“under the moon i confuse
you for a fruit
your tinny iridescence
& little pure
caloric value. in the
muck we suck
at the memory of colour,
of the gay
guy who snuck his fuck
into the pool
next door.” (p.51)
I’d love to hear more about these craft decisions, as well as other form choices like your use of all caps (like in the quotations in earlier questions, a style used throughout the book).
GA: In the section you quoted earlier, the ALL-CAPS SCREEDS work well to delineate text into separate, cycling clauses. They also allow for a shift of voice within a poem—for example, to introduce a sense of authority, a sense of nuts-ass hollering, or an intermediate position within those. My family’s facebook posts aura farm similarly: “CARVED PUMPKINS TODAY HAHA JAMES DID YOUNG SHELDON! HAPPY HALLOWEEN LOVE YA BIG!!!” One presumes the semiotic residue of art naif within the tool’s function is self-evident, darling.
As far as sound-play in poetry, this year I’ve been falling in love with Joshua Beckman, who can make any phrase sound delightful. I also listen constantly to a big variety of rap, so rhyme & assonance is really wedged in my head. I guess it’s a game of when can I get away with it? I like to laugh in bed. Sex and drugs are funny and loopy and it’s worth honouring them thusly.
In the section Shemalaise, there’s some notations in the poems, right-aligned on the page. Those I stole from parapolitical CIA researcher & Montreal poet, Peter Dale Scott. He uses them primarily for actual citation, as many of his poems require it, but they’re lovely little intrusions, so I adopted them for the book. His work is one of the most exciting things I’ve read recently.
This is your last question so I have to come up with other formal total geniusisms I have so I can keep talking—Dramatic dialogue has been a delightful addition to play with, I wanna do that more. I probably say internet words too much but I’m scared, were I not to, that I would be ignoring the world-as-it-is. Uhm…what else? I spent probably longer than is cool writing this, I’m really navel-gazing hard here. Thanks for caring. Reader, please let me sleep on your couch. Please google “cute baby cow”. Please find and read Lilith Latini’s poems.
Thank you for this, Conyer, your questions have been so, so thoughtful and kind.
Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldridge Morrisey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky living in Ottawa. A MacDowell Fellow, Tin House Novel Summer Scholar, and author of two award-winning poetry collections and ten chapbooks, their third full-length collection of poetry, the lake-shaped excuse, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Wolsak and Wynn.
