Yellow Barks Spider

At ten years old, Kid is increasingly disturbed by strange spider-infested visions of his next-door neighbour's shed. Pursued by shadowy memories that torment his waking thoughts, Kid falls deeper and deeper into a haunted inner world, retreating from his family and friends. Beneath this overwhelming pressure, the text itself begins to crumble, splintering as the workings of Kid's imagination become animate - and language self-destructs. Emerging from this anguish, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she navigates love, sex, addiction, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But, when a family member falls ill, she is forced to return to her hometown and confront all the old fears she thought she'd left behind.Yellow Barks Spider is an unforgettable portrait of trauma, isolation, and self-compassion. It is a deeply-felt exhumation of memory, love, and the human spirit, and it announces a bold new voice by a debut author. "Yellow Barks Spider hypnotizes me. The hyper close contemplation of seemingly small and ephemeral images is peculiar at first. The prose makes the unremarkable remarkable and unsettling. These images then begin to loop into an intimate trance-like narrative. Harman Burns absolutely vaporizes the going home-again trope and gives us something urgent and original."- Amber Dawn, author of My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems