Description
Abstract: In the foreword to Maryville (2025), Joelle Taylor writes that “we remember the journey and honour the road” (1), before leading the reader through a visual poem that makes a geography of grief, a roadmap of remembrance. Following on from the TS Eliot-winning C+nto and Othered Stories, in Maryville, Taylor animates her fallen heroes, four butch dykes, and constructs a conceptual space for them to live through 50 years of queer history. The eponymous Maryville bar is constructed as a space of escape for her ""wrong walking women”, while also becoming a living archive in itself. Over the fifty year period of the collection (1957-2007), the narrative collection’s bartender (Jack Catch) spends time reckoning with real spaces that are inhospitable environments for queer women, while protecting and polishing other queer worlds and futures in the form of snowglobes that provide the backdrop to the bar. This paper will discuss Taylor’s concept that poetry for queer women in particular provides environments of care, turning urban sites and imagined geographies into “safe spaces to be dangerous” (In Conversation with Travis Alabanza). This paper will question whether moving between real and imagined spaces provides environments that work as sites to remediate loss, while historicising overlooked iterations of queerness. It will propose that there is a sensibility within contemporary queer poetry to create safe environments in collected works to communicate real-lived queer experience, while interrogating the idea of the narrative extension as a method of environmental reclamation and historical remediation.| Period | 30 Sept 2026 |
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| Event title | UCC Department of English research seminar |
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | Cork, IrelandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |