Purchase Never Picked First For Playtime!
Dustin Brookshire
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the author of the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is also the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). His work has earned him both Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, has been published in numerous publications, and anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Dustin is the curator of the Wild and Precious Life Series, founder/editor of Limp Wrist, founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets (a chapter of the Florida State Poetry Association), program director for Reading Queer, and a founding member of FLAWN (Florida Local Artist and Writers Network). Find him online at dustinbrookshire.com.
Praise for Never Picked First For Playtime:
“Think of all the delicious ways you’ll live,” Dustin Brookshire writes in Never Picked First For Playtime. He’s addressing us—the reader of these poems—who get to live vicariously through these fabulous Barbie poems. Brookshire poses Barbie in various lives, in various quintessential roles. The accumulative power of Never Picked First For Playtime shows us that Barbie’s essence is very much part of her performance: her naturalness is a feature, another thing you can pose and style. Unlike Covid-19 Barbie (“no one will remove her from the box”), you should definitely take these outrageous, funny, and subversive poems out for a spin. They are delicious.
—James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
Dustin Brookshire's Never Picked First For Playtime is an interrobang of a book as well as a brilliant and heartfelt homage to Denise Duhamel's 1997 classic, Kinky. Rife with sharp wit and keen social commentary, this supercharged sequence of Barbie poems ("COVID-19 Barbie," "Susan Collins Barbie," and "Anti-Vaxxer Barbie" among them) will have you howing??? and wowing!!! from cover to cover.
—Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted
Look out Margot Robbie—here’s the real truth about the fashion icon who started as a gag gift party doll. Dustin Brookshire’s got the true intel. Taking a cue from his friend and mentor Denise Duhamel, Dustin Brookshire’s renderings of Barbie are beyond Beyonce fierce, Toy Story without the other toys—these poems put the fun in dysfunction and the tics in politics. This collection is hilarious, cutting, knowing—we thought we knew everything about Barbie, but the truth is, she’s everywhere: she’s the omniscient pulse of a consumerist nation, and Dustin Brookshire pulls out all the tropes to make us laugh and cringe at what our fave fashion doll has become.
—Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman