ABOUT THIS BOOK

A post-apocalyptic Native poetry collection that creates possibility for repair and reconciliation by holding the simultaneity of a violent past and a hopeful future.

Aja Couchois Duncan’s third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, explores cycles of violence, loss, and love that arc across history. Composed of intersecting narratives, this collection follows a post-apocalyptic collective of survivors living in a state of gratitude, shame, and awe amid desecrated ecosystems. The present tense of The Intimacy Trials carries the magnitude of a historic past tense filled with land theft, genocide, settler colonialism, and the vicissitudes of romantic love. Couchois Duncan’s lyrical, concomitant stories produce a space that holds in balance the complexities of life—joy, despair, intimacy, and irreconcilable grief.

In language that is prophetic, lush, and unequivocal, The Intimacy Trials is a loving accountability letter to our past, present, and future selves, holding both our yearning for connection and the remembrance of what has driven us apart.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Aja Couchois Duncan is a leadership coach and movement capacity builder of Ojibwe, French, and Scottish descent living on the ancestral and stolen lands of the Coast Miwok people. She is the author of Vestigial and Restless Continent, which won the California Book Award for Poetry. Her other projects include the collaborative opera Sweet Land, which was named the best opera of 2020 by the Music Critics Association of North America.

REVIEWS

“As both conjurer and postapocalyptic archaeologist, Couchois Duncan holds the ability to defy gravity with her singular poetic laminations, creating intersecting narratives that swell and contract like electrical pulses of the heart. The depth of her writing is on full display in The Intimacy Trials. This lyrical archive is speculative memory and a necessary retelling, an atmospheric river of grief and survival.”

— Stacy Nathaniel Jackson, author of "The Ephemera Collector"

“Few poets can write with such scope and specificity as Couchois Duncan, whose work offers a dynamic ecopoetics keen on Indigenous futures beyond survivance. Couchois Duncan’s work holds more than command of the erotic and more than the trope equating a femme body with the land; it has the complex associative logics of myth (and poetry for that matter). With The Intimacy Trials, Couchois Duncan asserts that there is complex comfort in tracking the disappearance of what we can inventory while ignoring what it means to outlive all but time. This is not the old language.”

— Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Optic Subwoof"

“Set in seven sections of extended lyric fragments—'treble,' ‘witness,’ ‘bass,’ ‘quaver,’ ‘ritual,’ ‘pitch’ and ‘fissure’—The Intimacy Trials begins at the beginning and expands ever outward. . . . Duncan expands and threads a storytelling lyric, weaving the past into the present, documenting history and trauma and resilience into the possibilities of both the present, and a possible future.”

— rob mclennan's blog

“Camouflage, song, rebirth.”

— Ms. Magazine, on "The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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