The Bright Afters
Forthcoming April 2026
When a gay teenager is stabbed in a high school bathroom in West Nowhere, Nova Scotia, the surrounding community is sent into a tailspin. The Bright Afters is a poetic container for the pain endured by the town and surrounding area — and sometimes, their confessions. The voices we hear from include the sympathetic (a favorite teacher) and the arresting (the kid who stabbed Colton). As Colton recovers, his powder keg sister Christine and his escapist best friend, Annie, have the most to lose from the act that almost killed him — and the most to gain from coming to a new understanding about the senseless violence.
Told from a variety of perspectives, The Bright Afters seeks to interrogate collective and individual trauma, queer belonging, and the ways in which a place sculpts the people it produces.
The Chaise Lounge (chapbook)
In this haunting collection, Sadie McCarney places the confusion of dementia somewhere at once familiar and uncanny—IKEA. There, a queer elder searches for her lost wife amid disorienting store sections that pulsate with long-buried memory. Deep love persists alongside the indelible traumas of life as an LGBTQ couple in a heteronormative society. Readers will be moved further than the in-store restaurant by this bittersweet poetic journey.
Your Therapist Says It's Magical Thinking
Winner of the PEI Book Award for Poetry and Finalist for The J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award, Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking is a buoyant second collection that playfully navigates the turbulent waters of life with mental illness and neurodivergence.
Head War (chapbook)
Head War, winner of Island Fringe's Oscar Wilde Award for Work Celebrating Nonconformity, is a found poetry performance text culled from the records of Sadie McCarney's two-month psychiatric inpatient stay in 2013. Through this text, we uncover the brilliance of Mad life through the cold, clinical language meant only to describe it to outsiders.
Live Ones
My first full-length poetry collection, Live Ones (longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the PEI Book Award in Poetry) grapples with mourning, coming of age, and queer identity against the backdrop of rural and small-town Atlantic Canada.