SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY by Dani Putney

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* Finalist for the 2022 LAMBDA Award for Transgender Poetry *

Dani Putney’s debut poetry collection, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY, is a lyrical triptych that traces the evolution of the speaker’s identity as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent individual. Each “panel” of the speaker’s life represents a distinct period of growth: a youthful beginning, which features important interactions with the speaker’s parents; a sexually charged middle period that demonstrates the speaker’s explorations of queer sexuality; and a contemplative third section wherein the speaker reckons with their various “selves.” Imagery of the American West percolates through the collection to ground the speaker in their intersectional identity.

94 pp.

Advance Praise for SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY:

“Queer creation ain’t easy. Some of its characteristics involve roleplaying with gender, danger, transformation, and death. In that regard, Dani Putney’s debut collection, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY, is a slutfest bravura, a graveyard of reinvention, and an erotic sanctification. These poems squeeze possibilities from corners in the U.S. ambiguated between love, lust, and heteronormative self-denial. Putney preaches, ‘Let me be / the sculpture I’m creating.’ Artaudian in spirit and Dimitrovesque in its carnality, Putney’s is a voice you’ll want to make room for!” – Roy G. Guzmán, author of CATRACHOS

“SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY is a paradise ankle-deep in desert sand. To read these poems is to rest within Dani Putney’s tender understanding of how the things we always touch—the bodies we love, the places we inhabit—are shimmered in our desire but never owned. In dazzling lyric, this collection makes us see the joys and helplessness in inevitably becoming the property of our own need: ‘Let me be / the sculpture I’m creating.’ Dani Putney’s poems are deeply attuned to the political contentions of 21st-century life while still cherishing the precious moments of queer love.” – C. T. Salazar, author of HEADLESS JOHN THE BAPTIST HITCHHIKING

“The compressed, lyric poems in Dani Putney’s marvelous debut collection, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY, are lessons in economy and potency. An early poem says, ‘If closet doors could speak / they’d say unravel’—and one finds a series of poems that carefully unravel a narrative of self-discovery and self-realization. What the reader finds is a world both public and private, a world of floral prints and cowboy boots, bathroom sex and roadside trysts, a speaker who is entirely singular and compelling. The speaker stakes their claim—‘if I’m not beautiful / what am I?’—and Putney is a poet with the capacity to show us this landscape and the things that populate it—their grit, their dust, and their beauty.” – Jim Whiteside, author of WRITING YOUR NAME ON THE GLASS

“In their triumphant debut poetry collection, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY, Dani Putney kicks down your door to announce they have arrived. With familiars of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and bees (and tattoos of Plath and Woolf on their thighs), Putney sets fire to all boundaries as they navigate multiple identities in the harsh desert landscape of the American West. As I read this collection, I found myself unable to put it aside for fear that the pages were still burning behind me while I raced to the end. Putney’s language is as fearless as their subject matter: they move with craft and audacity through the intersections of tenderness and violence, violence and lust, lust and rage, rage and family, family and love. Read this book with a fire extinguisher in hand and a bucket of ice water at your feet.” – Beth Gordon, author of MORNING WALK WITH DEAD POSSUM, BREAKFAST, AND PARALLEL UNIVERSE

“Dani Putney is an astounding poet of place. These poems teleport the reader to deserts, truck stop bathrooms, highway collisions—but also into moments of longing so realized they feel like a body being excavated. Poignant, unflinching, and powerful, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY is an essential collection of poetry by a new and compelling queer voice. ‘I want to live in the cracks of dry earth / outside between and among / where the queerest flowers grow.’” – Todd Dillard, author of WAYS WE VANISH