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Books

Queer poetry collections and hybrid memoir from nonbinary poet Erik Fuhrer. Every book uses a different form, erasure, horror, persona, myth, pop culture poetry, to approach trauma and queer identity obliquely. The formal experimentation mirrors the nonlinear, layered ways trauma operates in the body. Form itself became a method of meaning-making. That method is now what I teach in the Survival Kit Writing Collective, what I facilitate in workshops for teams, and what I build for clients in narrative strategy.

My Buffed Up Life by Erik Fuhrer, hybrid memoir and queer trauma narrative
Forthcoming 2026 · Spuyten Duyvil

My Buffed Up Life

A hybrid memoir and queer trauma narrative: a screenplay, a book of spells, and letters to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"My Buffed Up Life is both a love letter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a survival story. Fuhrer's work is a testament to how art can comfort and heal, give us hope, even in our darkest hours, even when the vampires look like ordinary people and walk in daylight, even when the Hell Mouth is inside of us."

Jessica Drake-Thomas

Author of Burials, Bad Omens, and Hollow Girls

Psychology Today Interview
Gellar Studies by Erik Fuhrer, pop culture poetry on queer trauma and identity

Gellar Studies

Spuyten Duyvil, 2023

Gellar Studies is a queer poetry collection, what arises when the academic genre of writing about an iconic body of work meets the personal essay. It is as much an examination of the impact of Sarah Michelle Gellar's work on a queer viewer as it is a personal meditation on childhood and queer trauma and the ways in which the work of particular media figures offers a space not only for identification but for performativity of a life lived otherwise. A work of pop culture poetry that uses Scooby-Doo, Cruel Intentions, and I Know What You Did Last Summer as a lens for queer survival.

"Gellar Studies will be exceptionally delectable and devastating for Gen X LGBTQIA+ readers who are familiar with Sarah Michelle Gellar's iconic work, but I am confident that any reader will quickly submerge themselves in Fuhrer's stunning, surreal, and powerful waters, hoping to never come up for air."

Addie Tsai

Author of Unwieldy Creatures · Shirley Jackson Award Finalist · From the Introduction

4.80 on Goodreads

Featured in Psychology Today (×2)

Featured at the 32nd Annual Virginia Woolf Conference (read more about Erik)

Blurb by Stephen Susco, screenwriter of The Grudge

Purchase·Psychology Today Feature·Review in Drunk Monkeys·Salt Lake Dirt Podcast·There She Is (ANMLY)
The Ocean and Its Movers by Erik Fuhrer, queer theatre on embodiment and voice

The Ocean and Its Movers

Free Lines Press · Queer theatre · A play on embodiment, identity, and voice

The Ocean is a trench coat, is multiple human movers, is a blanket and a salve. What does it mean to fit into one's body? To have a proper body? A proper voice?

"Lyrical and spellbinding, The Ocean and Its Movers pulls you in with all of the mysterious, insistent power of its eponymous character, inviting you, and its troubled heroines, to brave the unexpected."

Eric Glover

Author of Black Star

Purchase
Eye, Apocalypse by Erik Fuhrer, trauma poetry collection

Eye, Apocalypse

Spuyten Duyvil · Trauma poetry at the intersection of the political and personal

"The Apocalypse as love story, as a MAGA hat, as a poem: the Apocalypse personified. This collection showcases their skill at making the fantastical mundane and the mundane fantastical. Every piece in this book has a lingering bite, a tiny world-ender that sinks into you and doesn't let go."

Cathy Ulrich

Author of Ghosts of You

Purchase·Review in Independent Book Review
in which I take myself hostage by Erik Fuhrer, horror poetry on mental health

in which I take myself hostage

Spuyten Duyvil · Horror poetry as a way into mental health, the body under siege, and the everyday sublime

"This book of poems is a horror film. Bodies invaded by flies, walls covered with cockroaches, spores that ache to sicken you proliferate within these pages, squarely sourced in the soil of the everyday. Read this book; insert these poems into your skin."

Ali Raz

Co-author of Human Tetris

Purchase·Review in Independent Book Review·Interview with AM Ringwalt
not human enough for the census by Erik Fuhrer, queer poetry on bodies and transformation

not human enough for the census

Vegetarian Alcoholic Press · A queer poetry collection on bodies, aftermath, and transformation

"In Erik Fuhrer's not human enough for the census, there are creatures of dark habits, organ breathers, tree butchers. In these poems, aftermath requires a new language. Dust and ash compound with mother and father, mud compounds with blossom. These spare lyrics contain numerous transformations, and 'just because the body is gone does not mean the absence of body is gone.'"

Traci Brimhall

Author of Our Lady of the Ruins

Purchase·Review in Ecotheo
VOS by Erik Fuhrer, poetry and digital collage

VOS

Yavanika Press, 2019 · Erasure poetry from Virginia Woolf's A Voyage Out · Introduction by Dr. Laci Mattison

"Erasurist, Erik Fuhrer, in his Voyage Out Sonnets, is part vivisectionist, part misprisionist. In surgically erasing Virginia Woolf's A Voyage Out, Fuhrer augments the canon of great erasurists dating back to the Dadaists. A palimpsest of memento mori collages in noir serve as VOS' metadata for this book. Fuhrer's VOS is erasure's crescendo."

Daniel Y. Harris

Purchase·Review in Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Earlier Work

These earlier queer poetry collections laid the groundwork for what became the Survival Kit Writing Collective and the corporate workshop practice. Nonbinary poet Erik Fuhrer has published eight books across trauma poetry, hybrid memoir, horror poetry, and erasure poetry.

every time you die by Erik Fuhrer, poetry collection

every time you die

Alien Buddha Press

At Root by Erik Fuhrer, poetry and digital art

At Root

Alien Buddha Press

Selected Essays
Emmanuel (Channel Void; republished in Sugar Sugar Salt)
There She Is There They Are (ANMLY; republished in Edinburgh University Virginia Woolf collection)

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