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About
When a gay teenager is mercilessly stabbed in a high school bathroom in West Nowhere, Nova Scotia, the surrounding community is sent into a tailspin. While Colton fights for his life in a hospital room at West Nowhere General, everyone from a school janitor to the boy's abusive stepfather overflows with emotion in the form of verse monologues, unburdening themselves of their feelings.
The Bright Afters is a poetic container for the pain endured by the town and surrounding area - and sometimes, their confessions. The voices we hear from include the sympathetic (a favorite teacher) and the arresting (the kid who stabbed Colton). As Colton recovers, his powder keg sister Christine and his escapist best friend, Annie, have the most to lose from the act that almost killed him - and the most to gain from coming to a new understanding about the senseless violence.
Told from a variety of perspectives, The Bright Afters seeks to interrogate collective and individual trauma, queer belonging, and the ways in which a place sculpts the people it produces. Its individual poems take their names from Broadway shows, containing all of the community's fraught hope for a positive "big finish" to the story. A book-length lyric poem about a fictional homophobic stabbing at a high school in a small Nova Scotia community.
Sadie McCarney's other books are Live Ones and Your Therapist Says It's Magical Thinking. Her work has also appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Grain, Foglifter, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead, among other publications. She lives in Cornwall, PEI.
Sales and Market Bullets
• DIVERSE VOICES & CONTENT: At the epicenter of this long poem are two queer high school students, Colton (the victim of a brutal homophobic stabbing in the boys' bathroom) and his best friend, Annie, sent reeling by the violence. Sadie McCarney is LGBTQ+ and writes with compassion, beauty, and firsthand authentic experience.
• DECORATED POET: Shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award (2024), shortlisted for the Prince Edward Island Book Award for Poetry (2024, 2020), longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2020), finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize (2017), semifinalist for Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize (2017), finalist for the Malahat Review Far Horizons Award for Poetry (2016).
• EAST COAST APPEAL: The book is set in a fictional town in Nova Scotia and will resonate with local and regional East Coast readers.
The Bright Afters is a poetic container for the pain endured by the town and surrounding area - and sometimes, their confessions. The voices we hear from include the sympathetic (a favorite teacher) and the arresting (the kid who stabbed Colton). As Colton recovers, his powder keg sister Christine and his escapist best friend, Annie, have the most to lose from the act that almost killed him - and the most to gain from coming to a new understanding about the senseless violence.
Told from a variety of perspectives, The Bright Afters seeks to interrogate collective and individual trauma, queer belonging, and the ways in which a place sculpts the people it produces. Its individual poems take their names from Broadway shows, containing all of the community's fraught hope for a positive "big finish" to the story. A book-length lyric poem about a fictional homophobic stabbing at a high school in a small Nova Scotia community.
Sadie McCarney's other books are Live Ones and Your Therapist Says It's Magical Thinking. Her work has also appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Grain, Foglifter, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead, among other publications. She lives in Cornwall, PEI.
Sales and Market Bullets
• DIVERSE VOICES & CONTENT: At the epicenter of this long poem are two queer high school students, Colton (the victim of a brutal homophobic stabbing in the boys' bathroom) and his best friend, Annie, sent reeling by the violence. Sadie McCarney is LGBTQ+ and writes with compassion, beauty, and firsthand authentic experience.
• DECORATED POET: Shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award (2024), shortlisted for the Prince Edward Island Book Award for Poetry (2024, 2020), longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2020), finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize (2017), semifinalist for Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize (2017), finalist for the Malahat Review Far Horizons Award for Poetry (2016).
• EAST COAST APPEAL: The book is set in a fictional town in Nova Scotia and will resonate with local and regional East Coast readers.