ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DJ Hills is a writer and theatre artist. Connect with them online at www.dj-hills.com.

PRAISE FOR LEAVING EARTH

With their collection, Leaving Earth, DJ Hills reveals, through a voice that is simultaneously tender and relentless, the reality of self-discovery for a queer speaker in rural America, particularly in Western Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania. Here, spaces for intimacy are scarce, pushing young people further into the landscape of riverbeds, cemeteries, and overlooks. "Overlook" takes on a triple meaning in these poems as a place for meeting, the ways in which society ignores and reinforces violence against people who have been marginalized, and also how the speaker reimagines painful memories of place: “A city without memory / In that version everyone is smiling / and no one is holding a gun.” I needed this hard voice, these poems that carry such a bright message of knowledge through survival.

— Taneum Bambrick, author of VANTAGE and Intimacies, Received

I expected some folk blues in these pages, but I was also delighted by the throaty anthems. DJ Hills sings, they exhort, they urge love forward from the pelvis to the sky. Adjusting a lens first acquired in woodsy back country, the great cities of Baltimore and Oxford come alive with their vivid details. Their lines are like their love—relentless and restless. Between "the gentlest of touch / that sets cars blazing" and "we drank from each other" are the jagged mysteries of the world.

— Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?