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In oceanleaving, Daze Jefferies’ counter-history of rural trans and sex worker resistance evokes the ebb and flow of intergenerational love at the margins. Guided by archival relationships, dreaming, and regard, her lyric, visual, and prose poems are fierce in their address of colonial and sexual violence, gendered labour, and cultural loss in Atlantic Canada. With/holding and recasting the intimate presence of a watermother, a grandmother, a brothel mother, and a trans mother, oceanleaving offers a sensuous kinship between tenacious women and the sea.

"In oceanleaving, Daze Jefferies reaches back into submerged archives to honour rural foremothers and whoremothers. At once tender, intimate, searing, searching, and insistent, the poems in oceanleaving are captured, tethered, embraced, and released through the lacings and webbings of three visual “whore’s eggs,” or sea urchins. Jefferies weaves, stitches, knots, and tangles the fabric of rural women’s lives along the shorelines of the island she calls home, in the process dreaming through impossible pasts into longed-for futures. oceanleaving is a remarkable collection that haunts and lingers." – Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember

To read oceanleaving is to give yourself over to a spell of deep water, to breathe in salt memory how language glimmers darkly within the anarchive of “somewhore” else. In this exquisite and moving poetic cycle, Daze Jefferies weaves an Atlantic poetry, a sex workers’ poetry, a trans feminist poetry we have not yet known, yet it fits as divinely familiar and strange as the selkie of our own shimmering skin and still becoming kin. By turns lyric and graphemic, elegiac, erotic, and insurgent against the violences of colony, empire, and patriarchy, oceanleaving is achingly, mysteriously, tidallygood. – Trish Salah, author of Lyric Sexology