Mask for Mask

[Book trailer created by Phil Spotswood]

Please note: this is for an ebook in PDF file format only. An EPUB/MOBI may be possible in the future, however this poetry collection makes ample use of white space and experimental formatting that would be nearly impossible to properly capture in an EPUB/MOBI format. The print version of the collection is out-of-print as of 2023. I have a few remaining print copies available for sale. If you're interested, please use the contact form on my website to reach out to me. 

Mask for Mask

A debut full-length poetry collection by JD Scott.

Official Website: https://jdscott.com/mask-for-mask/
Publication Date: April 6, 2021
Publisher: New Rivers Press
Pages: 93 pages 

Book Description

JD Scott conjures up unruly personae that are propelled by queer fantasies, youthful regrets, incantations, and apocryphal parables. Mask for Mask is a kaleidoscopic poetry collection, one that is both formally innovative and an imaginative descent into LGBTQ+ undergrounds and underworlds. 

Advanced Praise for Mask for Mask

The fact that JD Scott writes about jjimjjimbangs (Korean saunas) should be enough for me to love this collection but it’s also the fact their poetry is exuberant and scintillating. It’s a magpie’s nest of verbal delights plucked from the late capitalist rituals of wellness, queer kitsch, and text-speak. This book is the queered language of artifice that points at artifice. In a world that buffs our bodies down to whetstones of sameness, Mask for Mask celebrates excess, and I’m all for it.
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

JD Scott’s queer-divine poems are both exorbitant and restrained, a decoction of 19^th century urges regaled in the “lace and stain” of diction, harnessed in stanzas, belted into the Escalade of lyric and driven through a 21-st century synthscape of emporia and empyreans. The result is an ensorcelling surface riven with a deeper moire, to wit: what is the “cytoplasm that keeps this car crash together”? Could it be youth, desire, or something altogether rarer, like tenderness, or care?
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne

Melding the profane with the sacred, the mundane with the mythic, JD Scott’s work shines poetry’s searchlight into the nightclub toilets of youthful debauchery to reveal transcendent cathedrals of timeless yearning. Tender as it is bold, spiritual, and erotic, this collection was “sucked into my lungs [so] that every exhale after will be called offering.”
—Heidi LynnStaples, author of A**A*A*A

Review Pullquotes

“When Scott embraces the complexity of their subject, the poems buzz with a frantic excitement that also charges their moments of felt beauty…Readers will find this a memorable and energetic debut.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ultimately, the poems themselves in Mask for Mask arise out of smoke. You reach to grasp something, and out comes a letter or a word, and out of that word is triggered a memory of some sort of self that had been tucked away that has been let out from behind the mask or the cage. … It is the fluency of expression, a dreamscape underwater, where Scott’s narrator swims and drowns, reminding us to “[u]se the mouth in the way that only you know how”—perhaps to breathe and live, to speak our truths or, simply, surviving another day to keep asking the questions that bring us closer to ourselves and one another.” —Michigan Quarterly Review