oceanleaving (forthcoming, 2026)
In oceanleaving, Daze Jefferies’ counter-history of rural trans and sex worker resistance evokes the ebb and flow of intergenerational love at the margins. Guided by archival relationships, dreaming, and regard, her lyric, visual, and prose poems are fierce in their address of colonial and sexual violence, gendered labour, and cultural loss in Atlantic Canada. With/holding and recasting the intimate presence of a watermother, a grandmother, a brothel mother, and a trans mother, oceanleaving offers a sensuous kinship between tenacious women and the sea.
Published by The Porcupine’s Quill (Guelph).
ebbs caressive (2026)
Of skin-yarns and circumbondage, ebbs caressive is woven from sea spit, subterfuge, and sex worker desire. A vessel, a foremother, a port, and a joy house entangle rural histories of women and water.
Chapbook published by Antiphony Press (San Francisco and New York).
pleasuremonger (2026)
An overview of my solo exhibition pleasuremonger, this catalogue features art, poetry, and a critical statement, a foreword by Jane Walker, as well as a curatorial essay by Emily Critch. Produced by Grenfell Art Gallery.
stay here stay how stay (2024)
An overview of my solo exhibition stay here stay how stay, this catalogue features art, poetry, and theory, a foreword by Kate Wolforth, as well as essays by Emily Critch and Sonja Boon. Designed by Hazel Eckert and produced by The Rooms.
water/wept (2023)
water/wept playfully explores intergenerational touches and relations that wash through the lives of trans sex workers in Newfoundland.
Chapbook published by Anstruther Press (Toronto).
This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors’ entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and futures.
poetry (selected)
Culture & Tradition, 36, pp. 46-47. 2025.
aftercare (2025 Arts & Letters Award)
Queer Country Crossroads, ed. Mabe Kyle, p. 141. Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press. 2025.
The Ex-Puritan, 66/67, 2025.
islets (2024 Riddle Fence Poetry Prize)
Riddle Fence, 53, pp. 4-6, 2024.
The Anstruther Reader, ed. Jim Johnstone, pp. 142-145. Windsor: Palimpsest Press. 2024.
Antiphony, 2, p. 40, 2024.
filling Station, 82, p. 16, 2024.
Horseshoe, 2 (1), pp. 17-18, 2023.
PRISM international, 62 (1), p. 32, 2023.
Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, 3 (1), pp. 16-18. 2023.
Spectral Lines: An Anthology of Visual Poems, 2022. Toronto: League of Canadian Poets.
every shadow a bother but you + annals of soft resistance
Arc, 94, pp. 38-39. 2021.
eating all your ashes i was meant to spread at sea
The Dalhousie Review, 100 (3), p. 358. 2020.
Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, eds. Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme, pp. 125-127. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. 2019.
creative scholarship (selected)
Active History. September 16, 2025.
Fish Trade Futures: Counter-Archives and Sex Worker Worlds at the Margins of St. John’s Harbour
Journal of Folklore Research, 60 (2/3), 67-94. 2023.
The Still Unfathomed Trans+Oceanic
The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, 19 (2), Art 3. 2022.
Blue Light as Ineffable Sensuous Other
Feral Feminisms, 10, pp. 132-136. 2021.
Seawater/C-cup: Fishy Trans Embodiments and Geographies of Sex Work in Newfoundland
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 11 (1), pp. 17-35. 2020.