Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival
This book can be opened with
Winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, a dazzling debut charting queer survival, memory, and joy across time
A time traveler crashes into a gay bar, and from that electric collision unfolds Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, T. S. Leonard’s dazzling debut poetry collection. Moving through glitter, ash, memory, and music, these poems follow a queer time traveler across decades and geographies, from turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Missouri to 1970s San Francisco to imagined origins of music itself. Along the way, they come of age, try drag, lose friends, and fall in love, tracing a life shaped by history’s ruptures and its celebrations.
Leonard’s poems travel through temporal sites of plague and resilience, from the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19 lockdowns, while also lingering in spaces of dance, performance, and community such as discos, living rooms, archives, and bars. Themes of change course throughout the collection in climate and cities, in bodies and identities, and in the fragile yet enduring structures of queer belonging. Even as the poems confront grief and loss, they insist on joy as an equally vital inheritance.
Rich with cultural references, from The Wizard of Oz to Felix González-Torres, from Tim Dlugos to Destiny’s Child, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival reads like a jukebox of queer history, each poem a track spinning across time. Leonard’s voice is playful, elegiac, and searching, asking how memory becomes record and how record becomes song. The result is a collection alive with humor, tenderness, and fierce imagination, a testament to survival and to the music that carries us through.
This book is a time machine, carrying its passenger back through the painful moments and the celebratory, sometimes stacked right on top of one another, so that the music and glitter and community are what linger. And the humor. ‘Every time god closes a door, a gay bar opens.’ Yes, his poems seem to say, we are doing what we can to heal the world.—D. A. Powell
T.S. Leonard’s kinetic and striking debut poetry collection Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival moves fluidly through grief and celebration, history and sexuality experienced both intimately and collectively. Threaded throughout are references to queer musical, artistic, literary, and cultural icons situating the work within a vibrant lineage. From the AIDS epidemic to climate change to lockdown, these are poems that mark the emergence of a powerful new voice.”—Maw Shein Win, author of Percussing the Thinking Jar
T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and educator whose work has been featured in Poetry, Foglifter, and Fourteen Poems and in collaborative projects at the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Design Center. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.