Finalist, Transgender Poetry

2024 Lambda Literary Awards

“The flathead fish—whose sex can be difficult to determine until maturity, which can take years—is a recurring image in Taking to Water. Conlon juxtaposes this with human society’s insistence on assigning sex (and gender, accordingly) to children at birth, as the poems in this arresting book argue for an alternative. . . . In poems of masterful precision and relentless interrogation past the surface of identity into identity’s beautiful complexity, Conlon asks ‘What does it mean to control your own body to con-/tort your own sweetness.’ ‘My gender,’ they argue, ‘is a war between layers,’ going on to say that if rainbow means a spectrum of color, gender is a ‘dispersion of a body / of light.’ Taking to Water is a startling, necessary collection; what Conlon says about gender’s spectrum can also be said for this book: ‘it will move across you do not be afraid.’”

Carl Phillips, author of Then the War: And Selected Poems

"If you aren’t from the southeastern US, chances are good you’ve never heard of noodling. And even if you have heard of it, with a name like noodling, it would be easy to miss the skill, danger, and genuine collaborative attention it requires. Conlon is an expert noodler of the patriarchal church, of family, of the gender binary—all of which is to say, misogynist systems of violence. Yet also with an eye on the world that 'loves them like flowers/mouthing their sun,' this poet is also expert at noodling the heart. 'I read hundreds of fish species/change from girl to boy/and back and forth like this.' Get wet with this water, friends. We are going from 'girl to boy, boy to girl, girlboy / to gold to boygirl to girlgoldboy to boygoldgirl.'"

TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

"Conlon’s Taking to Water is the most transformative collection of poems I’ve read. When Conlon’s speaker says “let there be life in me / in my own beginning” we are given a home in this affirmation of queer resilience, where self-fulfillment can stretch the landscape until the landscape agrees. Taking to Water captures the search for the ways the world could make room for us, 'make room / for my body & all / that comes with it.' Conlon has given us a sharper, better lyric to inhabit and demand the world with."

C.T. Salazar, author of "Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"