Coming April 26th. Pre-orders available now.
What does it mean to love someone well? What does it mean to be a good daughter, or a good wife? What does it look like to step outside the way these roles have been prescribed to us? In her debut full-length collection, I Now Pronounce You, Caroline Earleywine explores these questions and more as she takes us on the journey of a daughter processing the emotional landscape of her parents’ divorce, an Arkansas public school teacher coming to terms with her queerness, and a wife navigating the vulnerable work it takes to love your partner along with yourself as you both grow and change.
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An interrogation of traditions relating to marriage, gender, sexuality, and family, this book is for anyone who has looked up from the script of their lives and said, This isn’t working for me anymore, for anyone who needs permission to throw out the script entirely and live something more true.
Earleywine writes necessary new endings to our collective queer aching, because “some stories can’t stay inside the body.” A stunning debut.
—Lisa Summe
Earleywine breaks through generational patterns and heals those she holds dear with her unflinching voice.
—Kai Coggin
I Now Pronounce You is gorgeous, vulnerable, resonant, and wonderfully queer.
—Susie Dumond
Earleywine’s narrative voice is fantastically honest, both wounding and soothing us at the same time.
—Sierra DeMulder
It’s not just what you’re wearing; it’s who you are. Caroline Earleywine's Lesbian Fashion Struggles breaks the cycle of history’s tight-lipped queer mouth and clears out the South’s closet of its “sleeves empty with possibility.” These poems are a reckoning of her queer self, first as she comes out, and then as an out and married high school English teacher in Arkansas where others have been fired for loving openly. As political as every queer life is, it’s the happiness of finding, being, and loving yourself, it’s that promise, for those of us who still need to hear or to be reminded, that it will get better.
“Caroline Earleywine has written the book so many of us needed when we were younger. Nuanced, accessible, and gorgeous at once—Lesbian Fashion Struggles reads as a poetic field guide for being femme, queer, blonde, and presumed straight in Arkansas. This book is bravery in verse.”
— Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me