Here's to Letting Go

Poetry | Memoir
Pub Date: May 21, 2026 
5 X 8 in | 134 pgs 
Trade Paperback: 9781997529026

A community’s most silent, yet most resilient stories can be found by listening to unsheltered youth. 

Here’s to Letting Go weaves through the memories of a child seeking safety that was never found at Home. Thornton shares the challenge of escape to only find shelter under the northern pines, unsafe rooming houses, and couches that came with the worst cost. An unfiltered view from a young trans, non-binary person who desperately sought help but could bring yet more danger. This poetry memoir shines a light on what it takes to survive a childhood of chaos and danger and find a path towards acceptance and healing.

Praise for Here's to Letting Go

"A striking tenderness spills across each page of Blaine Thornton’s performance pieces, craving safety in safe spaces where there is precious little, how hearing someone call them “baby,” can fill a body, a sister to spot them as they move (their only constant). Here’s to Letting Go is entirely in the hearing, one of the kindest gestures one can offer freely. “I am scared of Love poems // fear I am not as gentle as they are.” Fear not, dear reader. The wishful heart of this debut is true."

— Kirby, Author of Fairy & Poetry is Queer

"Loving and becoming oneself in the dangerous places of home, church, school and out there in the world in dangerous times. Blaine Thornton tightly spun encounters, searingly tender with brutal truths, chart a genealogy of existence and wield language like an anthropological tool – a welcomed and important emerging voice in Canadian poetry!"

— Lillian Allen, 7th Poet Laureate  of Toronto and two-time Juno Award winner

About the Author