[09/23/26] Barton, Joss: Goodbye to a Dream Believed!

Goodbye to a Dream Believed! is a clutch of transsexual acid dreams and tweaker rave poems. Bound together in her singular style of nightclub stream of consciousness and righteous queer rage, these poems demand another bump, another battle, and another belief system. This book asks us to ponder what lies beyond the revelatory seconds of a poem's ego death and who will be there holding you when the party ends and the sun begins to rise. Goodbye To A Dream Believed! is Joss Barton's debut collection and was selected for publication by Futurepoem guest editors charles theonia, Uljana Wolf, and Elisa Biagini.

“When conditions are “spiritually botched”? When the fascists want you dead? Your only recourse is to take your life and “make them EAT IT!!!” Alive in the torrential time scale of crisis and gaping with insurrectionary pleasure, Goodbye to a Dream Believed! is present to the extreme, written in the middle of “the filthy hours” and looking out. These poems are an incitement to riot.”
—charles theonia

"Nothing can stop Joss Barton. She’s our cunted Jeremiah, our oracle of transsexual lust for life helixed around calamity. In Goodbye to a Dream Believed!, she’s assembled a symphonic composition of ache and delirium, a love-cry for sisters — and mothers, and chasers, and trade. She’s not catastrophizing when she sees the lively bloom of fascist social life in both expected and unexpected places; she’s asking what we do about it. Joss’s writing makes defiance palpable, something felt and developed together, and renders exquisitely the people who, thank God, make life exquisite.”
—Kay Gabriel

"To read these poems is to be hooked up directly to the noxious and numinous flow of the universe. Joss Barton is our Sibyl, transsexual prophetess of Amerikkka's underbelly, lip-glossed mouthpiece of the Goddess herself."
—Morgan M Page

“I judge contemporary American letters, my own included, against Joss Barton. I’m not sorry. Even if a more appropriate delivery of these poems might be billboards live-feeding a Motherless scroll interrupted by Lindsey Graham’s lapdog campaign ads, it’s beyond time that Goodbye to a Dream Believed! served Barton’s unforgettable, oracular drag-freedom-fighter performances to the literary public and shamed us all. Her “necro-syntax” knows our endless imperial sins include appeals to academies and industry awards, and that the rainbow became a red flag. Her vernacular’s honed in, knuckle-deep, and dripping the excess of somethin we can feel, thank god. Her lines’ passionate camera-panning amid communal ecstasies and tragedies feels especially St. Louis. From caps-lock to purse pout, Honcho bass to butane hum, her volume is as versatile as Around the Fur’s horniest tracks. “his spit inside you feels like movie credits ending in a glowing wreath of white nuclear light” ought to herald a new standard of relatability and euphony, or leave the language to those who need it. Alive in the overstimulated, under-articulated anguish of apocalypse after another, these poems are purely for the living. “Imagine / dancing for millions / dead.” Imagine crawling to find a dollar in fascism’s blacked-out and collapsing West Bumphuck trap without the blazing company of Joss Barton’s voice. Goodbye to a Dream Believed! is a bothersome, borderless, ban-bucking book, and everything that ain’t this is a smokescreen to me.”
—Justin Phillip Reed

"'I’m / simply asking to be remembered,' writes Joss Barton early in her triumphant debut, Goodbye to a Dream Believed! I believed her, but then I turned the page. These poems—rageful, tender, exuberant, sprawling—unleash the searing voice and indomitable spirit of a true artist intent on nothing short of total revolution. Read these poems to rouse every cell in your body and refuse the broken world for unimagined futures. Read them again for the defiance of love and the clarity of hope. Remembered? Of course, Ms. Barton. Of course."
—Charif Shanahan