Winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, a dazzling debut charting queer survival, memory, and joy across time
A time traveler crashes into a gay bar, and from that electric collision unfolds Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, T. S. Leonard’s dazzling debut poetry collection. Moving through glitter, ash, memory, and music, these poems follow a queer time traveler across decades and geographies, from turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Missouri to 1970s San Francisco to imagined origins of music itself. Along the way, they come of age, try drag, lose friends, and fall in love, tracing a life shaped by history’s ruptures and its celebrations.
Leonard’s poems travel through temporal sites of plague and resilience, from the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19 lockdowns, while also lingering in spaces of dance, performance, and community such as discos, living rooms, archives, and bars. Themes of change course throughout the collection in climate and cities, in bodies and identities, and in the fragile yet enduring structures of queer belonging. Even as the poems confront grief and loss, they insist on joy as an equally vital inheritance.
Rich with cultural references, from The Wizard of Oz to Felix González-Torres, from Tim Dlugos to Destiny’s Child, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival reads like a jukebox of queer history, each poem a track spinning across time. Leonard’s voice is playful, elegiac, and searching, asking how memory becomes record and how record becomes song. The result is a collection alive with humor, tenderness, and fierce imagination, a testament to survival and to the music that carries us through.
