Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch, glitterMOB, The Puritan, PRISM international and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016), was nominated for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is Arc Magazine’s Poet in Residence and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press. She lives on unceded Coast Salish territory/Vancouver, BC.

“‘Normcore’ is a fashion trend that’s seen as anti-fashion, a style of comfortable unisex dressing that eschews designer labels. In poetic terms, presumably, it’s meant to imply foregoing elaborate figurative language in favour of plainer diction. Thus the poems in Adèle Barclay’s second collection are conversational and channel a confessional voice, as the West Coast poet puzzles over ‘home, family and personal foundations.’ Power dynamics in relationships, queer desire and emotional tumult are refracted through a sensibility that is witty, sardonically funny at times and touchingly candid.” ~ Barb Carey, Toronto Star

“Barclay’s poems are full of queer joy, queer anxiety, queer yearning and queer solidarity. She has a knack for juxtaposing words and images in playful, unexpected ways.”