Audrey Yi Coble
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:43:34 PDT

The Lonely Years is an experiment. As a hybrid collection comprised of essays and poems, The Lonely Years both poses and explores the question: what is existence after trauma? With lungs full of the dense fog that surrounds truth, memory, identity, and reality, The Lonely Years invites readers to plunge elbows-deep into a double autopsy of creative nonfiction and the self-as-universe. A wide array of influences including horror, critical theory, and life in rural Alaska are treated with techniques as varied as dissection, cloning, mitosis, and fusion. The result is an attempt to replicate the internal processing and "self" of a queer, biracial, neurodivergent writer who is learning simultaneously how to write and how to be alive.