About the Author

Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and spending way too much time on Twitter (@Lsax_235). Lauren’s work is featured in Barrelhouse, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Homology Lit, and more. Her debut chapbook, You’re My Favorite, won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Book of Poetry, and is out now with Thirty West Publishing.

Reviews

“Lauren Saxon’s poetry asks us to consider how ‘life is still possible in the deepest of / trenches.’ Saxon’s poems do not look away from grief but stare it down in ways that reveal its power and its failure to fully consume. In Your My Favorite, Saxon transforms everyday objects and spaces—flowers, hospitals, classrooms—into mirrors that reflect our capacity for love and vulnerability to loss. Yet, the heart of this book is not defeat. Rather, we see a purposeful, relentless (re)construction of family, relationships, and love of all kinds. These fragments of people create an ode to a new self, one who can “write poems / well enough to make people feel seen.”

—Charnell Peters, author of Un-becoming (Winner of the 2nd Annual Wavelengths Chapbook Contest)

“Saxon's poems come in powerfully and stay lingering like a whisper ringing in your ears long after they’ve been read.”

—Alexandra Naughton, author of a place, a feeling, something he said to you, and final judge for the 6th Annual Wavelengths Chapbook Contest.

"In her debut collection, You're My Favorite, Lauren Saxon clarifies the convention that we are to choose between honesty and beauty. In fact, there is enough room for both and both fully. When Saxon writes, 'One explains how pain is good for a poet. In this way, perhaps you are good for me', she reminds us of the truly daring exercise of appraisal—how captivated the mind and heart can become by the familiar yet demanding task of living. Spanning the themes of race, memory, and relationship, these poems are a telling trove of generous forethought, an outstretched arm reaching toward the buoyed endeavor of love made precious by its proximity to the lurking chance of loss. What a tremendous gift this is."

—Olatunde Osinaike, author of Speech Therapy and The New Knew

Lauren Saxon’s You’re My Favorite is a feeling, one I recognize all too well—it is the deep sigh of exhaustion before persevering, the humorless voice that tells us “Damn shame. I tell you / being a Black woman.” In this collection, we bear witness to grief’s mutable nature, how it shapeshifts from fear to pain to hope and back. Saxon’s speaker looks loss in the face again and again and refuses to harden into bitterness. Saxon reminds us “that life is still possible in the deepest of / trenches. That given permission, we will continue seeking solace / in the tenderness that our own lies provide.”

—Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm

Often what we say about a book begins with what we are looking for. This is how we miss the forest through the trees. So, for once, we try to get lost in the woods and have things come asking for us. And maybe You’re My Favorite is the forest and the many voices come asking. And maybe we’re quiet enough that we listen. And maybe what they ask is something like—how do you learn to love whatever versions of yourself appear, likely without warning, throughout a life or a year or a day? Specifically, I say ‘the many voices,’ because every character in Lauren Saxon’s You’re My Favorite—the speakers and the spoken to—are trying to belong, “unsettled by the lengths we go / to disguise our own loneliness,” simply trying to “own [our] own joy.” That is the experience of the book—fitting the pieces of a life together into something joyous, “Because when grief placed us in each / other’s arms, we chose to dance.”

—J. David, author of Hibernation Highway