Queering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt's Rapture's Road

Abstract: Seán Hewitt's 2024 collection Rapture's Road intentionally centers queer joy. Queer desire unabashedly takes up space in the work, and queer personhood is represented, at least at times, as a state of ecstatic abundance. This is not to say that Hewitt minimizes queer suffering; Rapture's Road repeatedly asks us to bear witness to mourning and violence. Joy becomes, here, a "practice of survival"—not an effort to banish sorrow, but an affect that "effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks" (Gay 10, 4). The volume arrives at this affective orientation by enmeshing the human with the natural world: Hewitt's queer speakers offer us new ways of looking at nature, and nature reflects back felicitously on queer personhood. Its unselfconscious animal and botanical impulses illuminate the candor of desire, displacing shame and humiliation to make space for queer joy.