“The poems in Chelsea Creek are noteworthy for their beautifully controlled but deeply felt elegiac tone, for the insights they offer into the various kinds of brutality lived in and lived through its pages. Most significantly, they offer hope—a hope based not in sentimentality, but in the recognition that moments of tenderness, transcendence, and love can be gleaned even from the most hostile territory. It is in the recognition of those moments, and their rendering into precise language, that the bruised heart, mind, and soul can be fed, and even healed. This is a healing book.” –Rose Solari, Contest Judge, author of The Last Girl and A Secret Woman

LGBTQ activist and poet, Linda Quinlan grew up the daughter of union parents, a factory worker and a carpenter. As the lesbian mother of two sons, Linda explores issues of gender, and motherhood while also observing the particularities of past and present cultural landscape. Currently residing in Montpelier, Vermont, Linda cohosts a cable access LGBTQ news show with her partner and a friend.

“The poems in Chelsea Creek are noteworthy for their beautifully controlled but deeply felt elegiac tone, for the insights they offer into the various kinds of brutality lived in and lived through its pages. Most significantly, they offer hope— a hope based not in sentimentality, but in the recognition that moments of tenderness, transcendence, and love can be gleaned even from the most hostile territory. It is in the recognition of those moments, and their rendering into precise language, that the bruised heart, mind, and soul can be fed, and even healed. This is a healing book.” –Rose Solari, Contest Judge, author of The Last Girl and A Secret Woman

“Linda Whalen Quinlan’s beautiful collection of poems gives us memories of friends lost and of working class families complicated by love, tenderness, regret, violence, and shattered illusions, with hauntingly clear images set mainly in a New England town.” –Vittoria Repetto, NYC; author of Not Just A Personal Ad

“Linda Whalen Quinlan renders the rough terrain of working class New England with a lush beauty that pulls no punches, letting the brute hardness of a place and its people coexist with longing and love, finding the tenderness hiding inside tragedy. I love these poems.” –Michelle Tea, Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and Recipient of the 2019 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay