Jamie Townsend : part one

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet living in Oakland. They are the author of Shade (Elis Press, 2015) and Sex Machines (speCt!, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

What are you working on?

Late last year I had a perfectbound book “Sex Machines” and a chap “Sad Boi Merzbau” published, both of which were collections of discrete but thematically interconnected poems, mainly concerning gender essentialism, commodity culture, and queer resistance. Some of them are surprisingly funny. 

I am currently writing a book length poem titled “Glamor,” a section of which is being published as a chapbook later this year. Over the last several years I have also been doing a series of occasional interviews with other poets. Since 2013, I’ve designed and edited a quarterly creative commons literary and visual art magazine called Elderly with my friend, the brilliant poet and artist Nick DeBoer.