Quick Change Artist is a postmodern paean to Whitman's pronouncement, "I am large, I contain multitudes." From her "Fortieth Birthday Poem," through a series of secular psalms, to a "slanted crown" of sonnets written during the global pandemic, Wade's speaker in Quick Change Artist never stops evolving, in content or in form. She traverses physical and social geographies, dropping pins across the overlapping maps of popular culture, politics, lesbian identity, marriage, and middle age. From odes to elegies, lineated free verse to haibun and prose poems, Quick Change Artist is a stylish and subversive collection that wears many hats and strikes many chords.

Julie Marie Wade writes and publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid forms. Her most recent and forthcoming collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Fisk, by Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel, and Other People's Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025). A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.

"The poems in Quick Change Artist are quick-witted, inventive and insightful, and we can't help but feel Julie Marie Wade's joy springing in every line, walking a tightrope of poeticity and transformation, where the word sew becomes sex, where simile turns into smile, and a vowel to avowal, all this, right before our eyes. There are no dull tricks here, only graceful arrangements of words to shape a heartfelt abecedarian, a haibun, a 'slanted' crown of sonnets, and a series of psalms written in the spirit of pop culture. There are linguistic surprises at every turn, sometimes humorous, always profound: 'Everything a possible poem,' Julie Marie Wade writes, and in these pages, what is possible begins with a 'yen for affection' and every poem begins with a yes." — Octavio Quintanilla, Poet, Judge of 2023 Anhinga Prize for Poetry

"Julie Marie Wade's Quick Change Artist grapples with aging, wisdom and, most sublimely, the passage of time. Wade chronicles her stint here on this planet, born when 'Carter, our kindest President' was in office and bringing us through the pandemic which we can't spell 'without panic, can we?' Wade faces her mortality as she confronts the death of friends and mentors. She and her spouse reluctantly make a will — 'There was that part in our wedding vows about death & what it could do to us…' Both absurdist and earnest, the poems astound in their quick and changing gestures. Her poetic psalms sing these sacred and political poems, reminding us all that 'paradoxes/are your boxes.'" — Denise Duhamel, Poet

"In an early poem in this collection, the speaker is asked for advice and says 'leave some room /for Surprise me.' Surprise is abundant in these pages as the poems bring us an agile and perceptive mind in movement, equally likely to find meaning in Nietzsche or Batman, and always open to an expansive range of feeling. I love the delight Julie Marie Wade brings to this Art, transforming the ordinary materials of our lives — Overstock, Seinfeld, and animal crackers— into earnest Psalms, defamiliarizing what's in front of us and charging it with a tender and lasting wonder." — Matthew Olzmann, Author