The Intimacy Trials

By Aja Couchois Duncan

A post-apocalyptic Native poetry collection that creates possibility for repair and reconciliation by holding the simultaneity of a violent past and a hopeful future.

Aja Couchois Duncan's third book of poetry, The Intimacy Trials, explores cycles of violence, loss, and love that arc across history. Composed of intersecting narratives, this collection follows a post-apocalyptic collective of survivors living in a state of gratitude, shame, and awe amid desecrated ecosystems. The present tense of The Intimacy Trials carries the magnitude of a historic past tense filled with land theft, genocide, settler colonialism, and the vicissitudes of romantic love. Couchois Duncan's lyrical, concomitant stories produce a space that holds in balance the complexities of life--joy, despair, intimacy, and irreconcilable grief.

In language that is prophetic, lush, and unequivocal, The Intimacy Trials is a loving accountability letter to our past, present, and future selves, holding both our yearning for connection and the remembrance of what has driven us apart.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226848108
• ISBN13: 9780226848105
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.