Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover Art: Hobbes Ginsberg
Design: Katie Prince
$14 | 38 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-12-7
Essays l Perfectbound | March 24, 2026
Katie Jean Shinkle’s The Only Way Out Is Through is a contemplation on ‘ghost-time,’ the pasts we erase, but which remain nonetheless, which persist. It tells a story of a breakup, or rather a story of multiple breakages, severances between / within self and other, intimacy, love, care—a story that repeatedly opens and closes on the possibility of change, of renewal, much like the process of living itself.”
—thirii myo kyaw myint, Names for Light: A Family History
“The writing in The Only Way Out Is Through is exquisitely crafted; full of ruination, clutter, addiction, disarray, shame, destruction, but most importantly growth—the untangling of the endings of one space and the beginnings that remain.”
—luna rey hall, loudest when startled
“What does it mean to want to change when you feel chained to your insatiable desires? Shinkle’s adept ability to dig open the wounds of addiction (and the fear of attempting recovery) is singular. The Only Way Out Is Through will make you question the gin-soaked American mythos surrounding the arts and allow us to heal, to imagine the possibilities of life when one grants the self permission to want more, to love better.”
—min kang, darkly + completely
The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays
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I Say, Fuck the Bees, Kill Them All
But where would you keep her, / with all those huge strange thoughts in you / going and coming and sometimes staying the night? I say, fuck the bees, kill them all. What I mean is I am afraid. Bees, for me, are the only frightening insect, their flight and sound so painful. I use the word painful so often because language escapes me and I cannot find it. When I try to enter and re-enter it retreats, so fickle. Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic / orders? I want to run far away when I hear wing movement, thorax muscles, an alarm of buzz. I am leaned up against the kitchen sink wiping my hands with a dishtowel and I say, god I hate bees so much. You immediately anger.
The Only Way Out Is Through is a hauntingly elegiac meditation on the unyielding desire to start over.”
—eileen elizabeth espinoza, Carrying the Bones: Rituals for a Dying WorldAbout the Author
KATIE JEAN SHINKLE’s books and chapbooks include The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays (YesYes Books, 2026), Transference (Gasher Press, 2025), and Tannery Bay (coauthored with Steven Dunn, FC2, 2024). Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books), American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Awarded fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary and Ragdale, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.
