Kayleb Rae Candrilli

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.

Water I Won't Touch

Ruth Awad

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Kenzie Allen

J. P. Howard

Omotara James

Virginia Konchan

Jenn Givhan

Kendra DeColo

Laura Hinton

Caroline Hagood

Carolina Ebeid

Poetry isn't just the dusty classical poems we all studied in school. It's sexy, raw, political, edgy, and alive. The first of its kind, EMBODIED marries the unique aspects of poetry with those of sequential art in this contemporary graphic poetry. EMBODIED features new work on the theme of gender, identity, and the body from twenty-one of America's premier, award-winning cis female, trans, non-binary poets and adapts them into sequential art stories drawn, colored, and lettered by top cis female, trans, and non-binary artists. With strong BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representation, this anthology emphasizes inclusivity and the amplification of marginalized identities at a time when those identities are most under siege. A percentage of the proceeds will benefit International Women's Health Coalition.

An Intersectional Feminist GraphicPoetry Anthology

Embodied

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.”

Winter of Worship

Whiting Award winner, Kayleb Rae Candrilli's second full-length book, 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 Saints seeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia, and marred by climate change. And though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. They will unbarb your body if you let them.

All the Gay Saints

Poetry. Memoir. Born from the isolation of rural Pennsylvania, a life of homeschooling, and physiological and physical domestic abuse, Kayleb Rae Candrilli's memoir in verse, WHAT RUNS OVER, demands attention. Unfurling and unrelenting in its delivery, Candrilli has painted "the mountain" in excruciating detail. They show readers a world of canned peaches, of Borax cured bear hides, of urine filled Gatorade bottles, of the syringe and all the syringe may carry. They show a world of violence and its many personas. WHAT RUNS OVER, too, is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest forever. "When Roethke said 'energy is the soul of poetry,' he might have been anticipating a book like WHAT RUNS OVER, which is so full of energy it practically vibrates in your hand. Here, Candrilli's speaker sticks their tongue 'into the heads / of venus fly traps just to feel the bite,' then later, burns holy books in the backyard and rolls around in the ashes until they become 'a painted god.' This is the verve of an urgent new poetic voice announcing itself to the world. As Candrilli writes: 'This is what I look like / when I'm trying to save myself.'"--Kaveh Akbar

Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Books

Your next favorite book is out there