Winter of Worship
Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the “litter swirled around us”—a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in ghazals, “Marble Runs,” and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, “We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends.” Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes “all electronica and / glitch step.” We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner’s forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name. From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn, these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose “an ounce of gentleness.”
Water I Won’t Touch
Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won’t Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body’s healing from a double mastectomy―in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction―these ambitious poems put new form to what’s been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.
All the gay saints
All the Gay Saints is a collection of trans joy and resilience. Focused on love, partnership, and cultivating the landscape of one’s own body, All the Gay Saintsseeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia and marred by climate change. Though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. They will unbarb your body if you let them.
What runs over
Born from the isolation of rural Pennsylvania, a life of homeschooling, and physiological and physical domestic abuse, What Runs Over, a memoir in verse, paints “the mountain” in excruciating detail. In a sequence of vignettes, What Runs Over, is a book length nonlinear narrative of a rural life. The whole created is a world of canned peaches, of Borax-cured bear hides, of urine filled Gatorade bottles, of the syringe and all the syringe may carry. What Runs Over is a world of violence and its many personas. It is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest forever.
