The Rosebud Variations by Jaydn DeWald

In this debut collection of poetry and prose, Jaydn DeWald explores the relationships between individuality and community, queerness and the bourgeois nuclear family, genre expectations and a postmodern awareness, even distrust, of literary production. Can the imagination forge intimacy, love? Impact history? Or do imaginers merely exile themselves from the world? In a series of obsessive poetic sequences, the speaker-narrators of The Rosebud Variations variously pit themselves against giants of Western art and the heteronormative desires/values that all too often underpin them.