Hold Me Gorilla Monsoon, Colette Arrand

Poetry and Comics, 68 Pages, $11.95

Art by Scott Stripling


Colette Arrand gives self-effacing evidence that disindentification is the way love grapples. The grappling itself is constitutive, it brings together bodies that constantly have to mark their difference with and in spite of touch. Rather than embrace or refuse, in any absolute terms, Arrand lets us know that in this proximity holds the potential for both a rejection of queerness and the queerest of queer slippages. These poems are hot as fuck because they almost come together before they rend apart.

– Raquel Salas-Rivera


[Arrand’s] poems portray and confront the ways masculinity is performed and learned through professional wrestling. They triangulate hypermasculinity, queerness, and homophobia in wrestling, conveying the painful experience of encountering these things as Arrand’s speaker comes to terms with her own trans identity. These poems are ambitious and dizzyingly good.

W. Todd Kaneko, Waxwing (read full review)