Cover by Jazmin Welch
Any Other City was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in April 2023. It is a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was named Fiction Book of the Year by feminist bookstore A Room of One's Own (Madison, WI).
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings eventually sprout in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
"Any Other City sparkles with heart and sex, art and life. Hazel Jane Plante gives us a world of brightness and sorrow to get lost in. I didn't want to leave it." - Michelle Tea
“Any Other City dances you through the walls of fact and fiction, of time and place, to give us a heart-wrenchingly beautiful glimpse of a life lived through many lives. This is the vulnerable, loving, gorgeous, sexy trans dyke novel I didn't know I needed.” - jiaqing wilson-yang, author of Small Beauty
“Any Other City is a fictive memoir, a letter to two ex-lovers, a portrait of a trans punk musician as a young artist, and a healing spell for collective release. From Side A to Side B, it's sweet and sly, hot and wise; it glimmers with humble brilliance.“ - Megan Milks, author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
"It is everything I love about queer lit: it’s full of characters who are whole, flawed, and constantly changing. It’s about queer healing and the power of queer community and all the specific weirdnesses and wonders of trans life. [...] Hazel Jane Plante is writing some of the most innovative, challenging, and complicated contemporary fiction there is." - Book Riot
"Any Other City is a novel that’s reminiscent of a captivating concept album, becoming itself like a city, with nooks and crannies that beg to be explored." - Foreword (starred review)
"Part memoir, part poem, part novel, and part song, Any Other City is lyrical, ambitious, and vulnerable—a font of queer joy, an ode to the healing power of sex and kinship, and a celebration of trans feminine love, sex, and bodies, across every messy multitude." - Room
“What Canadian trans writer Hazel Jane Plante offers in her second book is a way to show a trans life in the making, rather than the sort of coherent narrative we are obliged to construct in retrospect ... Plante, herself an accomplished rock musician, writes lovingly about the process of composition. The ways of making a body - its presentation, its sexuality, transforming its traumas into livability - and of making visual art, writing, or music are all connected.” - The Nation
"Plante convincingly makes the case that there is in fact a difference between erotica and porn. The reader will also learn: how to eat an oyster, how to fist, how to muff." - Kirkus