From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind.

Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they'd turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.

Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virignia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one's own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.

How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism, Rooms offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself.