About Liner Notes

Liner Notes is an innovative, deeply intimate hybrid of poetry, memoir, and cultural criticism that traces a queer Southern man’s journey through staggering loss and fierce love. Structured like a pop song—Intro, Verse One, Verse Two, Bridge, Verse Three, Outro—each section composes a new track in the author’s evolving soundtrack of grief after the deaths of his partner Jim, his father, and his closest friend Josh.

Through lyric vignettes, narrative poems, and intertextual riffs on artists from Taylor Swift to Boy George, the book transforms mourning into meaning, stitching together memory and media to show how art becomes a survival strategy. Liner Notes is an elegy, a cultural mixtape, and an unflinching testament to how we carry the people we’ve lost with us into every new measure.