Shadows Cast a Strange Light (Paperback or Softback)

A web of dreams and reflections speckled with dewdrops of hope, revelations of queerness, and hate for the unrepentantly oppressive, Shadows Cast a Strange Light paints a familiar-yet-otherworldly landscape that lingers behind the eyelids. Old and fresh wounds clasp the beholder's hand through nightmarish and nostalgic sequences, providing an escape to the fond and forbidden places we'd long for in days lost. Presented in 2 parts beginning with "Solstice Spells," holidays and ancestral sorrows come to new necromantic life, revealing something ancient and arcane, while sowing the path for whimsically unsettling visions of gothic retrofuturism and kitschy sapphic romance. In "Decay, Dandelions, and Dysphoria," the mundane takes on an eternal shade by way of time dilation, with the experience of trangender womanhood as the event horizon. Both "becoming" and "always have been" coexist paradoxically like a knock on a door that opens both ways. From old notebooks caked with blood via torn fingernails, to carefully scrawled entries in grimoires nestled between thrifted candles, Alex Ùna Nóra Lorenzen speaks from the same place of curious trembling she experienced while peaking at apparitions down her childhood hallway. She is determined to survive the ongoing battle against trans people, but wouldn't be disappointed if these were the only words one had to remember her by.