Same-Sexy Marriage by Julie Marie Wade

"Julie Marie Wade's SAME-SEXY MARRIAGE does not succumb to the gravitational forces of the quotidian—the 'respectable' marriage or the 'dignified' jet-setting life. Instead, this remarkable novella in verse speaks about the unspoken and dives headlong into the familial territory of taboo. Speculation turns to circumstance and back again as Wade's speakers cavort over games of pool with Anne Heche, contemplate Jeopardy!, unspoken truths, and final understandings with estranged exes. For Wade's characters, finality is in flux but through her verse filled with unabashed honesty and joy, SAME-SEXY MARRIAGE revels in matters of love."—Oliver de la Paz 

"Julie Marie Wade's heart-tearing, heart-baring SAME-SEXY MARRIAGE left me stunned with open-mouth gratitude. In this moving book a mother invents a heterosexual daughter to tell the neighbors about, so she can pretend to have a life she loves. But the wise speaker in this book gives her heart to a woman, so she can invent a real life full of love. ('Anything less would be a waste of time.') Wade knows that the truth is the only story worth telling, and—thankfully for all of us—she tells it."—Aaron Smith 

"In this delightfully suspenseful sequence of poems, we relish in a poet doing what poets are called to do—to see most clearly in a world imagined, to cultivate compassion where there is none, to pull back the curtain of dangerous assumptions that make homes in our minds and in our language. 'This is how it feels to be living in a typo,' writes Wade, as she teases, mourns, and makes vulnerable the fragile straightness of 'Main Street and mainstream American values.' The poems in this collection, one rolling inevitably into the next, are a queer journey—irresistible, quirky, and same-sexy, indeed."—Stacey Waite

Julie Marie Wade (Seattle, 1979) completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women's Voices Chapbook Series; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay(Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT: POEMS (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014); CATECHISM: A LOVE STORY (Noctuary Press, 2016), and SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize selected by C.D. Wright. Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami and a regular book reviewer for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.