Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming

(forthcoming in September 2025)

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A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy.

You can pre-order Unfurl at the Duke University Press website, using the discount code E25CLARE for 30% off.

Excerpts

A Cluster of Practices: An Introduction

Practice: A routine. A repetition. A learning. A commitment. A deepening.

A cluster of practices shapes Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming.

***

a practice of remembering:

Time loops and swirls through these pages. Memory unfurls into the past-present-future, a phrase I use with great intention. In this practice of remembering, time does not travel in straight lines. Instead it swings wide. Arcs, twists, folds into itself. Wails long notes and short, an accordion gathering and releasing their breath.

I remember tremors as old as dolomite scraping over shale. Remember history as sweeping as the US Homestead Act of 1862. As personal as the federal government giving my great grand uncle 160 acres of stolen Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota land. I remember white pine and sugar maple as kin. Remember rebellion and love.

This practice expands to the Milky Way. Contracts to my tremoring hands smeared with muck. Functions on many different scales and scopes. Idiosyncratic and incomplete. Full of absence as well as presence.

***

a practice of survival and sorrow:

Survival and sorrow crouch in every corner of Unfurl. These pieces emerge during a time of on-going upheaval. Bees and bears live on the edge of extinction. Refugees trudge through the snow. Many of us navigate the everyday aftermaths of violence and death.

As I wrote, my words looped me back into old survivals and sorrows, past-present-future pouring into each other. I returned to the early years of the AIDS epidemic (1981-83) as I was coming out. Until effective life-saving drugs became available fifteen years later, that disease killed people of all genders by the thousands—particularly, in my world, gay and bi men. I remember my young queer self surrounded by unrelenting funerals.

In that decade and a half, death cascading around us, we sat in community and called the names of people lost to AIDS. Wave after wave—ten minutes, a half hour, sometimes an hour before we’d fall silent—the space flooding with an ocean of names.

AIDS to COVID-19, epidemic to epidemic, war to war, hurricane to fire: the dead keep piling up. Living with a broken heart has become familiar and common, a long-haul reality, not a temporary condition. This book is a calling of the names, a practice of survival and sorrow.

***

a practice of porousness:

My broken heart, skin, words practice porousness. Boundaries between human and more-than-human dissolve. Granite and aspen, pelican and beaver become kin. Sentient and non-sentient merge.

This practice blurs prose and poetry. Blends emotion, analysis, story. Uses citations to interlace different kinds of knowledge—kitchen table conversations, academically published histories, gratitudes to white pine and full moon.

Categories collapse and fail. Portals open into unclassifiable futures. I unfurl myself and invite you to join me in this endeavor, by turns demanding and joyful, unexpected and risky.

***

a practice of dreaming:

I dream and dream and dream in these pages, tapping into multiple modes of imagining—tasting, smelling, tactile sensing, intuiting, listening, moving. I practice dreaming as survival, pleasure, and rebellion. Claim as essential both the quirky ephemeral currents of sleep time and the rebellious utopian desires of waking time.

Many of us practice dreaming in the quiet of our slumber. But this work, particularly daytime justice dreaming, is also collective and communal. A skill we teach each other. A practice we cultivate together.

***

Writing this book over the last seven years has nourished me. Invited me to live more fully in my broken heart. Encouraged me to slip more often into rocks and trees. Enticed me to dream ferocious and tender rebellions.

May these words also nourish you.

Your Tremoring Hands and Mine

Strangers on the street

taunt, stare, turn away:

let us forget our manners,

compliance, veneer

of politeness,

teach each other

to keen and rage,

strut and flirt,

make them yearn,

turn to look again,

make them flee,

make them remember their own shivering skin, tremulous laugh.

Remember

1.
flicker startle
flash of motion
grip unsteady

a dailyness of tremors

2.
always
another rude
question pitying
glance

stranger doctor teacher judge social worker boss

in those endless
moments our hands
remember

3.
tectonic plates hungering
for friction heat
that long jolting rub
of rock against rock

and yet hold still still
til they can no longer
bear the stillness:

our hands remember
dolomite scraping
over shale

careen and shake planets
trembling on their axes

from Learning to Dream

…Our sleeping dreams shape muscle memory, carve pathways for the daytime work of conjuring communal thriving. But for many of us—grief piled upon grief, survival upon survival—imagining liberation feels impossible. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy so benefit from our diminished and kidnapped dreams.

I know my justice dreaming too often stay reactive, engaged with an end to violence and shame, rather than a proactive creation of joy and freedom. Sometimes all I can conjure is no—no to war, no to prisons, no to deportation, no to rape. I sit braced against a wall built from generations of rebellion and non-compliance.

How do we untether from our fear and exhaustion, float toward wild uncontainable dreaming?

Disabled Puerto Rican Jewish poet and historian Aurora Levins Morales burrows underneath this question. She talks about how our justice dreaming is often dismissed, trivialized as “just utopian.” The intent is to shut down the power of desire. These dismissals only serve to maintain the status quo. Her words invite us to actively claim utopian dreaming.

We who long for quirky, queer and trans, disabled and chronically ill, BIPOC futures are in the midst of teaching each other to cultivate our dreams. Both playful and serious, we ask each other: what are our superpowers? This question is intentionally silly, meant to shake loose our imaginations. Sometimes we name skills and knowledges we already have—ones that we need to encourage and value because they will save us. We tell each other:

I repair solar panels and heat pumps.
I grow food.
I dig deep with words.
I find keys and pick deadbolts.
I sew clothes.
I encourage the calming of nervous systems.
I live the brilliance of disabled ingenuity.

But I, the dreamer who didn’t always have capacity to dream, still filled with reluctance and more no than yes—what do I need to claim, trust, nourish my justice dreaming?

Read reviews:

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Read & listen to interviews:

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Advanced Praise

"Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming by Eli Clare is a balm, an invitation, a provocation. Time travel with these poems, essays, and access notes and soak in the disabled wisdom. Unfurl will open your spirit.”

Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire

“In Unfurl, Eli Clare offers a practice of survival rooted in interdependence and collective care. Confronting the ruptures of colonialism, diagnosis, categorization, and abuse, Clare offers the space for self to return to self. Here access creates intimacy, in ‘a river of stutter,’ ‘a feather bed of tremors,’ and an ode to moss, mushrooms, lichen, rocks, and leaves. Yes, this is a book about learning how to dream.”

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

"Eli Clare’s Unfurl moves in many directions, an intricate whirl, a spiraling dance across time and place toward radical, open-ended crip trans/queer abolitionist and anticolonial world making. Both balm and toolkit, these poems, stories, and dreamings do urgent work, sharing histories, memories, and practices of care and action against our racial-imperialist, genocidal, ecocidal present. They gather and honour communities, build our capacities for resistance, and refuse the violent coercions of power.”

Trish Salah, author of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1