Connor Shieldes

I Am So Happy I Am a Wake Connor Shieldes

Connor Shieldes prides himself on his dark poetry. In his debut poetry chapbook, Mr. Connor Shieldes reveals what it's like to have chronic mental illnesses as a transgender man with gender dysphoria: a feeling like no other, which Connor Shieldes has described is like someone swapped [his] soul with a body that looks great, but isn't [his]. Shieldes divides his book into two (rhyming) sections: "The Depressives" and "The Narratives," of which the latter explores lighter, storyline-oriented poems and ballads. Don't be fooled by the author's seemingly lightening sense of life in part II of his poetry book, though-- the final section of the tongue-in-cheek I Am So Happy I Am a Wake includes a final poem which hallmarks the returning, almost-avenging nature of clinical, cyclical depression, schizoaffective disorder, gender dysphoria, chronic PTSD, and many other mentally-debilitating conditions: they all come back to haunt the sufferer in the end. But for Connor Shieldes, his outlet is writing, and his written accounts provide much more than a sliver of hope and validation across a spectrum of surviving the life he and many others lead as lights through the darkness... With sleek, crisp, blunt, and punk-rock-influenced styles in both Shieldes's original poetry and drawings, prepare for a time-warp into one transgender man's ingenious, clever, amazingly-witty, tortured-- and yet resilient-- mind.