Thick City by Katie Jean Shinkle

Description

Thick City is an attempt at reconciliation of need and desire: the cyclical characters adjacent and sutured together create a constellation of a cityscape caught in its own fists. In the space of innovative prose, Thick City focuses on language and how language escapes, begins, reemerges, and lives.

“Thick City is a dark mood whispered in delicate prose. Prepare to be haunted by this ghostly journey through Katie Jean Shinkle’s imagination.”
—Timothy Willis Sanders, author of Modern Massacres

“Thick City is a wild collection attempting to manage the intersecting lives of narrators all broken by the same disruptive environment. At times disturbing, other times raw and sad, each section bleeds into the next, pulsing curiosity, betrayal, regret, and repentance, asking the reader to try to breathe without oxygen, without promise, without a real reason to exhale.”
—Monica Prince, author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem

“Thick City is a fascinating illustration of desire, delusion, and self-destruction. These brief stories are full of heart, shame, and longing for a better way. Katie Jean Shinkle’s language will hypnotize you with its dynamism and unforgettable imagery.”
—Ursula Villarreal-Moura, author of Math for the Self-Crippling

“Katie Jean Shinkle’s lyrical, subtly revelatory Thick City tells the interwoven stories of lovers, addicts, and travelers bedding down in the sort of city that passes for home when you haven’t got any other. Bedroom, pet store, smoky outskirts are all fair game for our most private, unresolvable moments. And like the residents of Thick City Shinkle’s stories are willing to dwell in the strangest, most sorrowful, the wryest, most ruined neighborhoods of the human heart. Not because they’re breaking. Because they’re healing. I love this book.”
—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite

Katie Jean Shinkle

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four novellas and six chapbooks, most recently None of This is an Invitation (w/ Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press, forthcoming) and Will You Kiss Me Goodnight? (The Offending Adam, 2021). Other work can be found in Flaunt Magazine, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Fugue, NELLE, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 poetry fellow at Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM, and is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program.