It’s very difficult to be gender-expansive in 2026. I won’t belabor the point when it’s not hard to find bad news. But one thing that’s brought me comfort in these trying times is the queer literature of the mid-late 20th century. Not because the content is particularly comforting, but because it is relatable. We are losing access to the rights we’ve won over the last 40 years and finding ourselves on the precipice of a returning human rights landscape our queer elders survived—or didn’t. So Jean Genet’s novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, written largely while in prison and Nazi-occupied France, feels prescient in a way I wish it didn’t. Queer people are once again being forced into underworlds to survive. But this time we have people who can show us how to safely exchange fluids and care, or fluids as care. Work like Genet’s, or the classic Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, shows us that we can still find liberation in our pleasure during political moments such as these. And wow, does Slutflowers ever find pleasure.
Amanda Earl and Matthew Walsh’s chapbook Slutflowers is a series of golden shovels which uses the English translation of Genet’s novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, as its source text. Like Genet’s novel, this chapbook is for the sickos and the perverts—those who find themselves spit-roasted by the lovers Wit and Language. From the poem “Gayspeak”:
the structure of the body, my queer body in words
like fruit, or artiste if you are excellent at fellatio, or
my favorite, fairy. To sleep in a flower with dreams
untouched by the reality around us to exist as them (4)
“Fruit” and “fairy” are obviously well-worn slurs used against queer people, but here they become reincorporated into desire in queerness. “Fairy” becomes the very enclosure needed to project against its attack. By reclaiming pejoratives these pejoratives so early in the collection, this poem is essentially foreplay for the coming act: freeing language from the body.
You cannot make assumptions of authorship with Slutflowers. Amanda Earl and Matthew Walsh have their names on the front but no indication within as to who wrote which poem. This defiance of precise authorship is so brilliantly non-binary and frees the language into its queer potential. Take for example the poem “Stumbling”:
Nature fucks my body as I walk
by the river, not a blue Virgin Mary but a scarlet harlot, all leg,
glorifying in the gust lift of my gown, aroused by its movement
between my cunt lips. I know voracious libido at this age is peculiar. (13)
In queer sex, we call whatever we use for pleasure the words we want to hear the most, regardless of the physical anatomy. Brontez Purnell writes extensively about “slaying box” in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a term which can mean either vaginal or anal penetration depending on the context. It can also apply a kind of vaginally charged double meaning on someone’s asshole, which can feel affirmational mid-coitus! By refusing to assign precise authorship to their poems, Earl and Walsh free all gendered terminology and imagery from the confines of sexual distinction and stereotype. In the words of Izzy Roland dribbling a basketball with her crotch, “You don’t know what I’ve got.”
Unmoored from anatomy, Earl and Walsh make an “old whore” (13) of language. It is a language that has gotten around, been there and done them, and knows that a cumshot is a kind of community care. In a delicious perversion of Wittgenstein, Meaning is used. Meaning is used in a big hairy gay man’s armpit, a threesome with a waiter and a waitress, the bodymind with a welcome belly full of sudden warmth. You know what you’re getting into with Earl and Walsh on their own but the two of them together is the greatest gangbang you’ve ever found surfing PornHub. Let Slutflowers envelop you slowly. Savour the kindness in every drop of shared water with this golden shower of a golden shovel. Read it at the pace you masturbate and take breaks if needed.
Amanda Earl is a pansexual, polyamorous, feminist pleasure slut, and somehow, finds time to write, edit, publish, review and organize literary events. She’s managing editor of Bywords.ca, and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Her latest book is a near-death long poem collection entitled Beast Body Epic (2023), which was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Poetry Award. Earl writes so that kindred misfits don’t feel alone. She loves e-mail that isn’t spam: amanda@amandaearl.com.
Matthew Walsh is a poet and was born near the Atlantic Ocean. They were the winner of the John Newlove Award at some point. They lost the Trillium Award and the Gerald Lampert awards in 2020 but was a finalist. They have a chapbook with Anstruther Press called ICQ and two collections of poetry, these are not the potatoes of my youth (2019) and Terrarium (2024) which is currently a finalist for the 2025 Trillium Award for poetry. They are a demisexual and is currently working on becoming a full time hermit.
Publisher: Knife Fork Book (2026)
Chapbook 5.25” x 5.25”| 28 pp
ISBN: 978-1-989355-81-7
Jamie Kitts (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People. She is the author of the chapbook Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024) and a co-author of All Things to Keep You Here (with Egg Poets, Qwerty Homerow, 2023). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Augur, new words, Plenitude, Yolk, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor and Homerow Chapbook Series Editor of Qwerty Magazine, and she is also the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit. Author photo by Jessica Webber
