Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel
Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel
Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel
by Ryan Stephen Thornton
156 pages | 5x8" paperback | Independently published
Welcome to the book that smells like sunscreen, tastes like peach fizz, and reads like a queer summer gospel whispered across sticky skin and scribbled napkins.
In Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel, Ryan Stephen Thornton throws open the sweaty velvet curtain of the queer subconscious and performs a liturgy of lust, laughter, longing, and liberation. Part maximalist bisexual prayer, part body-positive spellbook, part horny literary séance, this poetry collection sings the unsung holiness of thighs, eyeliner, and unspoken softness.
Whether it's describing Capri Sun as a sex hazard, praising the sacred stickiness of a chub-rub summer, or invoking the ghost of Oscar Wilde mid-hookup, Thornton’s poems shimmer with grit, grace, and glitter. Blending performance-poetic swagger with tender lyricism and mythopoetic sensuality, this book is for the girls, the gays, the theys, and the others who are tired of apologising for wanting more.
Trigger warnings? Yes. Glimmer warnings? Absolutely.
This collection won’t save you. But it might see you.
And if you blush — good. That means it’s working.
Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel is not just a poetry collection—it’s a maximalist act of queer reclamation. Across 156 pages of electric, irreverent, tender, and devastating verse, Ryan Stephen Thornton unzips the body and invites you to witness what lives inside when shame is shaken off like a damp towel on a hot day.
Structured in five sections—Becoming, Body Electric, Strokin’ Heat, Mythopoetic Sunbeasts, and After Light—this collection builds a queer cosmology of lust and longing, joy and grief, dissociation and delirious desire. It’s a world where summer is a gender, where bisexuality isn’t confusion but choreography, and where every stretch-marked, sweat-slick, soft-lit body becomes a sacred site of resistance.
With poems that move between the mythic and the messy, the political and the profane, Thornton writes through the ache of queer memory, the heat of body image reckoning, and the camp erotics of the almost. You’ll find yourself in saunas with the ghosts of dead poets, in beer gardens with unspoken crushes, on buses with too-tight trousers and a heart full of risky metaphors. This is language that smirks, seduces, and occasionally sobs in the toilets.
This book is a love letter to the soft boys, the thick girls, the horny theys, the ghosted and the ghosting, the gendered and the unmade, the sweat-slick saints of public affection and post-shame survival. It is for anyone who has ever been too much, wanted too badly, or dared to believe their body could be holy before being fixed.
If you've ever felt unseen in the mirror, in literature, or in the glances of someone who almost said it back—Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel is a reminder:
You were always art. You were always enough. And yes—your thighs can testify.
Available Editions:
✨ Standard Edition – The original paperback version, fulfilled via Amazon. Accessible, portable, and still likely to make you blush on public transport.
✍️ Signed Edition – A lovingly hand-signed copy, posted directly from the author’s lair (probably with ink-smudged fingertips and a bit of sticky poetry residue).
💌 Deluxe Signed + Custom Poem Edition – Includes a hand-signed copy plus a unique, one-of-a-kind poem written just for you. Tell Ryan a little about yourself, a prompt, or even just your favourite fruit—and receive a personal poetic relic to tuck inside your book or your heart.
Because poetry should always feel like it was meant just for you.