Club Desire’s poems are set in the salt and smog-filled world of the upper Narragansett Bay, centering on Providence’s Allens Avenue and a fictionalized version of the strip club of the same name. When designing the book, I proposed makeing matchbooks for this fictionalized strip club, similar to ones I found in The Sexual Minorities Archive in Holyoke, MA.

Club Desire is a heterotopia where sites of extraction and waste are promiscously entangled with scenes of bodies in lustful embrace. Laura intentionally makes it difficult to delineate overlapping realities. For Laura, the strip club is a metonym for the excesses of capitalism and the orgiastic violence of settler-colonialism. It is a nuanced perspective where both sex work is work, and also work is often exploitation.