Not everyone has a friend like ginger Christmas princess, the subject of two poems that bookend the first section of Gwen Aube’s debut collection, Missed Connections with Tall Girls.

Clad in Walmart yoga pants and flanked by her depressed pitbull, she’s rendered with loving nostalgia, vividly depicting the grime and sparkle of trans experience in a techno-capitalist world. This care will make you feel like you’ve loved ginger Christmas princess your whole life while dazzling you with her newness. It is unsurprising and well-deserved that this feat, and the poet behind it, were recently recognized by the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ Emerging Writers.

Multiple registers of all-caps vivacity run throughout the work. A potent cocktail of humour and aggression in the imperative “DOC I THINK I’M A FUCKING WOMAN. / WOMEN HAVE VAGINAS. GIVE ME MY FREE MONEY NOW” is countered by headline-style updates on the capitalist hellscape–“PALANTIR IS UP / AND TRADING 46x ON REVENUE” – and the timeless harkening of “COME YE NEEDY AND BROKEN / GIRLS.” Aube is as loud about injustice as she is about love, creating a meticulously balanced book that is critical without being callous, celebratory without being saccharine.

One could say that the final section, “For Herma,” is the most outward facing for its ekphrastic focus on Gustav Klimt’s Hope I, but it reflects the most heartbreakingly personal themes in the book: the desire for the possibility of pregnancy and the despair in its absence. Even, or maybe especially, when faced with the limits of the flesh, community resounds as the answer, whether in the clinic-white walls of Ottawa’s National Gallery or the scrawled-on bathroom stalls of Montreal’s Brasserie Beaubien.

So if the back cover blurb of Aube’s debut doesn’t grab you –”train-hopping, pill-popping, fur-wearing, sink-pissing, tranny punk odes!” – then the depth of her heart, and the gaggle of girls within it, will.mRb