Living Fossils

Living Fossils invites readers into an unnatural history museum where coelacanths, horseshoe crabs, goblin sharks, and other curious creatures illuminate a narrative of queer and trans survival. Born in Paraguay and adopted to the United States, Guay navigates complex experiences of gender, commodification, and otherness through fish that order at gas station diners, toads that do magic tricks, and dinosaur skeletons that glow. Drawing together playfully ekphrastic prose poems and lyric investigations of violence, this collection wanders the exhibit halls of U.S. empire and emerges with a portrait of what it means to keep living in the face of extinction.