In Meteors and Other Crashing Things, the Vancouver poet’s much anticipated debut collection, Harry McKeown braids queer rural lyricism with recovery memoir and transpoetics to trace a body in its path to becoming. Leaning into the feral, the camp, and the absurd, the poems navigate AA meetings, apple orchards, theatre camp, foster dogs, video games, and psych wards, mapping McKeown’s own journey of obsession, transition, and survival.

“loneliness is a crank only you can turn,” McKeown writes, “a tower filled with bells / a structure made of holes / the hermit pulled year after year.”

These arrestingly frank, plainspoken and often provocative poems interrogate addiction, shame, masculinity, butchness, desire, and faith, confronting the controlled horror of addiction and abuse with ferocity and dark humour. McKeown examines—whether it is in fragments, prose poems, or confessional lyrics—how shame adheres to the body and how language constructs gender.

Rooted in contemporary queer discourse, Meteors and Other Crashing Things expands the terrain of transpoetics, in the end settling on a notion of survival as a volatile, unsentimental daily practice of unfolding.