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Silas Maxwell Switzer
queer archivist, musician, poet
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ORDER MY CHAPBOOK HERE!

 * PRAISE FOR NINE PARTS WATER, ONE PART BLEACH
   
   Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach is a complex and piercing debut collection.
   In these poems, we see both history and present with unflinching clarity.
   Uncovering and documenting Pittsburgh’s local queer history, Switzer also
   opens our consciousness to the vast everywhere of queer erasure. Switzer
   calls us in to queer recovery, to queer history, and to a queer lyricism that
   feels like a beautiful, stubborn streetlight flickering in its insistence,
   its fracture, its undeniable grace. -Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography
   
   In Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach Switzer captures Pittsburgh’s erased
   lives, loves, and landscapes with the ingenuity and integrity of poet— a poet
   who is also a street scholar, a digital archivist, a lyrical photojournalist,
   and psychic detective. Switzer exposes the ways social injustice metastasizes
   into environmental injustice. The names and images recovered here make the
   forgotten present. Every act of recovery in this compact, terrific collection
   is a call to action. -Terrance Hayes
   
   Haunted by evanescence and absence, Silas Switzer unearths artifacts of the
   AIDS epidemic in this devastating debut collection. Resurrecting touchstones
   of queer culture in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Switzer is deft and
   restrained. His spare, striking language reconstructs history hidden under
   bridges and behind storefronts, while the intimacy of his poems damn the cold
   jargon of bureaucracy. This is not a book of remembering. This is a reliquary
   warning against the complacency of forgetting. -Michele Battiste, author of
   Waiting for the Wreck to Burn



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