a body more tolerable

Ferocious and vulnerable poems about redefining acts of creation, destruction, deconstruction, and recreation, from a singular Indigiqueer point of view.

a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinised female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.

In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.

'jaye simpson's a body more tolerable is a singular achievement. Her poetic project, at once forward-dawning and ancestral, both revolutionary and decolonizing, is given total expression in this book. These poems moved me immensely; there is so much beauty and feeling power in all of them. No one is writing like jaye simpson.' - Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus and Coexistence

'a body more tolerable is a work at once open and lyric, fearless and tender. Expanding grief's territory into moments of relation and desire, simpson also challenges 'home, as a wayward theory' into a poetics of self-mothering, of being beyond becoming. This collection is a fierce and resistant nurturing.' - Liz Howard, author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

'jaye simpson is one of the most compelling and incisive voices of their generation. In a body more tolerable, they seize the English language and command it into an instrument that meticulously sings the realities of their present moment. I found solace, fire, and a relentless love for living and loving in these poetic offerings. a body more tolerable is a wayward map, and it is gorgeous. I'll carry it close to my heart.' - Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies