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Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor and the poet laureate of Portland, Maine. Refused a Second Date is eir second full length collection. Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023), their debut full length collection, was a finalist for the New England Book Award. mayawilliamspoet.com

Praise for Refused a Second Date:

In this raucous collection, Maya Williams captures the relentless mundanities, mysteries, and social awkwardness that dating often entails. Refused a Second Date deploys strategic repetition throughout to reveal not only how dates with both men and women yield similar disappointments, but also how inter- and multiracial relationships are stuck in matrices of union, disentanglement, children (or no children), mental health obstacles, and domestic violence. Perhaps because of these multigenerational patterns, the speaker opts to be childfree, to focus on self-care (therapy being one aspect of this care), and to boldly give voice to queer celebration of Black and Brown femme bodies and ways of moving through the fraught world. This collection is at once humorous, sad, heartfelt, and vulnerable—it reflects the truth of a present informed by history. I felt less lonely in its depths.

—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of

Refused a Second Date is an empowering exploration of relationships, power, and the blunders of Bumble. By examining love throughout time, from intergenerational patterns to contemporary technology, Maya Williams leads their reader on a path of discovery. Refused a Second Date will charm, challenge, and stir you—leaving you with new reflections on the relationships in your life.

—Shay Alexi, author of unbridled

The poems in Refused a Second Date live in the spaces between bad first dates and Bumble messages, Never Have I Ever games and a mother’s contradictions. Williams is blatantly and beautifully honest about the disenchanting and damaging pursuit of love: “You love your role in the mania for passion . . . You are your partner’s as needed wet dream.” What is at first lost is not regained, rather reinvented, in this collection about the lengths taken to live in our world as a queer person of color: “Absolutely nothing to prove / to anyone but ourselves and our hearts.”Williams leaves us infatuated.

—Diannely Antigua, author of Ugly Music

In Refused a Second Date, Maya Williams interrogates the complexities of dating, desiring others, and wanting to be desired in return. Williams shows what is possible when we look at the same scene, read the same words—from different perspectives—revealing truths about our very nature: what it means to have a body and inhabit a physical reality where we are racialized and sexualized at every turn, and the ultimate desire to be understood by both strangers and those we allow into the most intimate parts of our beings.

—Eloisa Amezcua, author of Fighting is Like a Wife