In I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, J Brooke writes about eventually finding the language for nonbinary (as an elder queer) after growing up in a world of tight aesthetics, manners, and expectations: the world of fifth avenue wealth. Complicated by the heightened expectations of gender, Brooke covets the littlest things: button fly pants, a middle part, their brother’s Timex watch glowing in the dark.

On this side, you’ll find Brooke trying on their father’s suit coats in secret, in a haze of their mother’s menthol smoke at Bergdorf’s, taken down 57th to get a nose job at eleven.

And on the other, in the packer short, in the flaccidity. In the testosterone between us. In Michelangelo’s sexuality, and in the erasure of T from the alphabet, in love–witty, acerbic, deadpan. What becomes of a person free from all that highly controlled dysmorphia? They affirm their gender everywhere.

J Brooke’s work is known for exploring gender, family, and the incendiary combination of the two. With this, their first book, they deliver candid commentary on a unique gender journey. Born intrinsically male, assigned female at birth, and raised in affluent dysfunction in New York City, their gender expression attempted male, cis straight female, and cis gay female before embracing a nonbinary identity. Living without surgical or hormonal interventions, their struggle to find authentic place traverses female anatomy, friendship, suicide, family, testosterone, politics, packers, social media, motherhood, royalty, natural phenomena, cancer, marriage, and the pope. Brooke is Prose Reviews Editor at The Rumpus, and lives in New England with their beautiful spouse Beatrice.

National Bestselling author J Brooke’s debut poetry book,  I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side, is one of Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2026, won Driftwood Press’s Editor Choice Award, was Ashland Press’s2025 Richard Snyder Prize Finalist and is a USA Today Bestseller. Brooke’s other honors include Pushcart & Best of the Net nominations, The Iowa Review’s 2025 Nonfiction Prize Finalist, Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize Winner. Their work appears in Electric Lit, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. They are Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive and the Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus.