Advance Praise
“Essaying the very queer core of desire and its aftermaths, as dream, thought, memory, and action, Amelia Ada’s mesmerizing HARD AND GLAD advances new forms and opens up novel vistas for a life in transition, a trans life, as lyric. The narrator of this collection’s eight sections bares their life on the page, in fresh, oneiric, striking, sex-rich language forged from sometimes fraught but unforgettable moments of experience. HARD AND GLAD, often tender and delectable, lives up to its title and then some.” — John Keene, author of Counternarratives and Punks
“A buoyant powerhouse of a book, HARD AND GLAD remains faithful to the irregular rhythm of transformation. The securely asymmetrical phrases tease the limits of representation, and draw the stimulated reader closer to a consummated marriage of desire and language. Glad thanks to the gifted Amelia Ada for intrepid sleuthing in the treasure chests of the unsaid.” — Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My Lover the Rabbi
"This is a golden age of the long poem. Maybe because we need something vast to respond to our times. HARD AND GLAD is surely one of the great texts on desire this century has produced. A fierce lyric of divorce, a stream of music and specificity and sex and the kind of shattering that makes rebirth possible. Mothers, fathers, childhood, queer longing, twisted relationship, transformation--the book's themes are primal, and its movements are spellbinding.” — Jesse Nathan, author of Eggtooth
“What a joyride! HARD AND GLAD, Amelia Ada's brilliant novel in verse, shocked me into a kind of hyper-alert reverie with the immediacy of its lyricism. Which is another way of saying I couldn't possibly stop reading. Ada's speaker describes and investigates the end of a queer marriage alongside the tender emergence of a trans self, sharing a performance of a growing personhood that creates intense intimacy with a reader. These poems are lyrical and hot and sad and messy and precise and funny all at once, both individually, and as a whole. They're as invested in meaning and in heart as they are in craft, and my notes are full of endless quoted lines with exclamation marks. I was reminded of the way I read when I was a very young poet, and perhaps more easily astonished. These days, my astonishment is harder won, and this book had me absolutely dazzled. I am so HARD AND GLAD for this book!” — Miller Oberman, author of Impossible Things
HARD AND GLAD is a book-length poem which details the urgency of a queer marriage's dissolution, written in real time.
Full of eros both bitter and sweet, poet Amelia Ada spins a lyric twist on the tradition of the trans coming-out novel. Written in real time from the midst of a queer marriage’s death spiral, HARD AND GLAD traces an arc of self-revelation in an epic poem marked by unflinching candor, dark humor, and grace. A powerful debut by a fresh and fearless new poetic voice.
Available 13 October 2026 from DOPAMINE / Semiotext(e)
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Divided in eight movements, HARD AND GLAD is set in California, between Oakland and Los Angeles. It blends elements of autofiction with fragmented prose-poetry to illustrate both the end of a ten-year relationship—the husband is called Disappointed and the narrator calls themselves H+G—and the narrator’s coming to terms with a latent desire to transition their sex and gender.
In a talk she gave in May 2026 at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, Ada said the following about the book: "I call it a transition memoir, one in which I refuse to discuss any of the details of my somatic sex alteration procedures. It ends months before I even started HRT. There is no scene in which I lie in a bed in a clinic in Morocco or Bangkok or Los Angeles or wherever dreaming of the boy I was and the woman I am about to become. No. In the book, the narrator is nonbinary and the dream is much less clear. The dream is of a door. How the door opens and closes and how the narrator is afraid of it, more afraid of the door than of what is on the other side. […] Because it is a book of dreams HARD AND GLAD is also a book of sex. What my desire looks like and how my desire moves, how it became trapped in a bad marriage and how it escaped and what it found when it did.”
Excerpts
Queer Poem-a-Day from Deerfield Public Library | June 2024 | “Lately being a bit extreme at parties …”