Quick Change Artist is a postmodern paean to Whitman's pronouncement, "I am large, I contain multitudes." From her "Fortieth Birthday Poem," through a series of secular psalms, to a "slanted crown" of sonnets written during the global pandemic, Wade's speaker in Quick Change Artist never stops evolving, in content or in form. She traverses physical and social geographies, dropping pins across the overlapping maps of popular culture, politics, lesbian identity, marriage, and middle age. From odes to elegies, lineated free verse to haibun and prose poems, Quick Change Artist is a stylish and subversive collection that wears many hats and strikes many chords.
