A5, 28 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitched, 2022

Literature about contemporary urban Aberdeen is long overdue — here, Parel Joy’s poems express that strange grey cold sometimes-sparkling city through queerness, dykedom, a focus on utopic little moments where a lesbian commune can bake ‘sourdough loaves the size of a room’. These are poems strung between place and form, Amsterdam and Aberdeen, Dutch and Scots-informed English, a global displacement backlit by the whorls of late-capitalist affect. But also, critically, tenderness; care. A cottagecore unlimited. — Ian Macartney

Parel Joy is a poet, writer and printmaker. Their work was previously published in Wicked Gay Ways, Blacklist Journal, The Gaudie and Hysteria, and their zine I Dreamt I Was Kissing a Stranger is currently for sale at Good Press in Glasgow. They were recently commissioned to design a temporary mural in Aberdeen's city centre, on view during June 2022, and their work was also included in the Unseen World printmaking exhibition in De Wintertuin, Antwerp. Parel relocated from Aberdeen to Antwerp in the summer of 2021, and occasionally works as a literary translator. The Queen of Cups and Other Poems is their pamphlet debut.

Published by