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Chronicling reproduction and parenting within a lesbian relationship, this poetry collection reveals both the anxieties and awe inspired by rearing children. 

In her frank, vulnerable third book of poetry, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers considers queer kinship through scientific, cultural, and personal lenses. Bad Cell presents perspectives on family and inheritance that are at once granular and comprehensive. From a pregnant woman being mistaken as a man by a store clerk to some “FAQs Re: Queers & Reproduction” that dispel stereotypes, the collection celebrates the fluidity of gender.

Early in the volume, Rogers addresses the emotional and physical complications of fertility treatment and pregnancy loss, a medical journey that, though harrowing, is gorgeously rendered in taut lyric language. Later, in forms like the abecedarian, definition poem, questionnaire, haibun, and a sonnet crown, the poet looks at how cells themselves—the stuff of life—divide and recombine. As in previous collections, Rogers leans into science-inspired verse, showcasing her talent for turning small-scale mechanics into meaningful metaphors. 

The book also supports an openness to neurodivergence in children: “I want to assemble / something that can speak / for everyone,” says the speaker of “Apraxia.” And Rogers does, with the skill of a seasoned poet and essay writer, whose eye for the particularness of the world is encompassing and gives new insight into the experience of parenting: “But I’m not mom, I tell / writers who think I’ve gone soft, given up deeper subjects. As if these wild, / xenogeneic offspring aren’t a full-on wrestle with the deep.”

A collection of narrative essays on femininity, sexuality, community, and belonging

Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be “more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.”

Adulthood takes Rogers to Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and China, but each essay finds her reckoning with participation in and resistance to rigid cultural institutions—whether a coming-out story set at a high school beauty pageant or a meditation on swimming pools as emblems of racial divides across the South. In lyric prose enlivened by a poet’s sense of musicality, Miss Southeast considers how both place and our layered identities shape our sense of belonging.

The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of Earth’s devastation from climate change and natural disaster. As humans begin to colonize the planet, history inevitably repeats itself. Dystopian and ecopoetic, this collection of poetry examines the impulse and danger of the colonial mindset, and the ways that gendered violence and ecological destruction, body and land, are linked. “This time we’ll form more carefully,” one voice hopes in “Ecopoiesis: The Terraforming.” “We’ve started on empty / plains. We’ll vaccinate. We’ll make the new deal fair.” But the new planet becomes a canvas on which the trespasses of the American Frontier are rehearsed and remade. Featuring a multiplicity of narratives and voices, this book presents the reader with sonnet crowns, application forms, and large-scale landscape poems that seem to float across the field of the page. With these unusual forms, Rogers also reminds us of previous exploitations on our own planet: industrial pollution in rural China, Marco Polo's racist accounts of the Batak people in Indonesia, and natural disasters that result in displaced refugees. Striking, thought-provoking, and necessary, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons offers a new parable for our modern times.